Free Black Thought Profile picture
Mar 31, 2021 12 tweets 5 min read Read on X
1/11

British gov't has released the report of its Commission on Race & Ethnic Disparities (CRED).

"Put simply we no longer see a Britain where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities. The impediments & disparities do exist, they are varied, and ironically... Image
2/11

"...very few of them are directly to do w/ racism. Too often ‘racism’ is the catch-all explanation, and can be simply implicitly accepted rather than explicitly examined.

The evidence shows that geography, family influence, socio-economic background, culture & religion...
3/11

"...have more significant impact on life chances than the existence of racism. That said, we take the reality of racism seriously and we do not deny that it is a real force in the UK."

Read it here:
gov.uk/government/pub…
4/11

A response was issued by @DontDivideUsNow—whose members include @Miss_Snuffy, @Inaya, @MrCDHamilton, @ikeijeh, @estherk_k, @musodza, @SarahPeace, @calvinrobinson, @ZubyMusic & others:

Report author "Tony Sewell’s bold statement will surely be welcome for many people...
5/11

"...of various minority ethnicities, as well as the majority of white people, who, since the death of George Floyd & subsequent BLM protests last year, have felt like strangers in their own home.

The main strength of the report is its insistence that the complexities...
6/11

"...of social life cannot be reduced to a single variable, which in this case, is race. The report does not deny that racism exists, but it does maintain that not all disparities are incontrovertible proof of racism. Even where disparities point to racism...
7/11

"...it can be challenging to ascertain the causal weight attributable to it because racism doesn’t exist as a discrete feature. A far more complex picture of the distribution of material & cultural goods in British society emerges than the dominant one in public discourse.
8/11

"The report will no doubt irk those who have considerable emotional, not to say professional, investment in the narrative of Britain as deeply institutionally and structurally racist, but hopefully, most will engage with it in the spirit with which it has been produced:...
9/11

"...with an open a mind as possible, and a view to creating a better public understanding of complex social realities where some long-standing disparities co-exist with new realities. This is not to deny racism past or present, but it does suggest that where inequalities...
10/11

"...exist, it is more likely to be because important foundational values of cultural and political liberalism, namely tolerance, freedom and equality, have been forgotten, ignored or rejected. The report’s publication is itself a timely reminder...
11/11

"...that those charged with the power to effect policy changes, or shape public opinion, need to be practically guided by liberal principles."

Read @DontDivideUsNow 's response to the report of the UK's Commission on Race & Ethnic Disparities:

dontdivideus.com/ddus-response-…
The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED) issues a follow-up statement in light of the misrepresentations of its work:

gov.uk/government/new…

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More from @FreeBlckThought

Sep 17
Remember when the neo-segregationist left told you that white doctors were killing black babies?

Turns out they were either incapable of analyzing their own data or outright lying to you.

A new study demolishes the failings and falsehoods in that first study. We unpack it: 🧵 Image
2)

The original study claimed black newborns had lower mortality rates when cared for by black physicians. This got a lot of attention and influenced legal discourse, despite its, ahem, limitations. Classic 2020: it was as if they wanted you to think black people and white people couldn't live together.

pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…Image
3)

The study was so influential it was even cited (with clumsy inaccuracies) by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent in the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case, demonstrating how far-reaching its conclusions became.

archive.is/iWTz1#selectio…
Image
Read 10 tweets
May 30
Academia is a stronghold of totalitarian thought-control.

A librarian made the resources in our Compendium of FBT () available to his university campus.

His colleagues "did not feel safe" and attempted repeatedly to have him fired.

His story, this 🧵 bit.ly/36FTtDQ
Image
2)

"In December of 2022, I published on our university library website a research guide consisting of a bibliography of black writers with heterodox views. By May of 2023, five months later, I had been labeled a racist, placed on administrative leave, and targeted for firing." Image
3)

"The bibliography was created and compiled by folks at an organization called Free Black Thought whose mission is, in their own words, to represent the rich diversity of black thought beyond the relatively narrow spectrum of views promoted by mainstream outlets. Although their website contains a variety of resources, my librarian’s eye was immediately drawn to their bibliography, which they named the Compendium of Free Black Thought (). They presented it as an open access work and encouraged folks to use it as they see fit.bit.ly/36FTtDQImage
Read 15 tweets
May 13
"How could it be that the university is zealous about policing pronouns but blasé about the advocacy of hateful violence?"

Roland Fryer's latest for the WSJ, "Anti-Israel Protests and the ‘Signaling’ Problem," reproduced here in full. 🧵 Image
2)

"The anti-Israel protests on college campuses present a puzzle for observers of academic norms and mores. Today, even relatively minor linguistic infractions, like the failure to use someone’s preferred pronouns, are categorized as abuse at many elite institutions, some of which even define potentially offensive speech as 'violence.' One need not even speak to run afoul of campus speech codes; I recently participated in a training in which we were warned of the consequences of remaining silent if we heard someone 'misgender' someone else.Image
3)

"Definitions of 'harmful' speech have become so capacious that one assumes they include antisemitism. In some cases, they surely do: A university wouldn’t take a hands-off approach to a student or faculty member who expressed prejudice against Jews in the manner of Archie Bunker or the Charlottesville marchers. Yet that’s what many of them have done when faced with protesters’ speech that is offensive to Jews, even when it crosses the line into threats, intimidation and harassment.Image
Read 16 tweets
May 8
"I understand the ethics underpinning the protests to be based on two widely recognized principles:

1. There is an ethical duty to express solidarity with the weak in any situation that involves oppressive power.

2. If the machinery of oppressive power is to be trained on the weak, then there is a duty to stop the gears by any means necessary.

🧵Image
2)

"The first principle sometimes takes the 'weak' to mean 'whoever has the least power,' and sometimes 'whoever suffers most,' but most often a combination of both. The second principle, meanwhile, may be used to defend revolutionary violence, although this interpretation has just as often been repudiated by pacifistic radicals...Image
3)

"t is difficult to look at the recent Columbia University protests in particular without being reminded of the campus protests of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. At that time, a cynical political class was forced to observe the spectacle of its own privileged youth standing in solidarity with the weakest historical actors of the moment, a group that included, but was not restricted to, African Americans and the Vietnamese. Young Americans risked both their own academic and personal futures and—in the infamous case of Kent State—their lives. I imagine that the students at Columbia—and protesters on other campuses—fully intend this echo, and, in their unequivocal demand for both a ceasefire and financial divestment from this terrible war, to a certain extent they have achieved it.Image
Read 10 tweets
Apr 16
The ORIGINAL original "woke":

The Wide Awakes was a youth "marching club" formed in 1860 to support Abe Lincoln.

Slave-owners feared them: "One–half million of men uniformed and drilled, and the purpose of their org to sweep the country in which I live with fire and sword."
Image
Image
2)

Wide Awakes—the ORIGINAL original "woke":

Our cause is Abolition,
And for the Nigger we do cry;
For we do love the Nigger,
And will love him till we die.

'Tis honest Abe and Hamlin,
We want to rule our nation,
And for the Nigger we do claim
Equality of station.

loc.gov/item/amss-cw10…Image
3)

Wide Awake Club ribbon depicting Lincoln:

"In February, 1860. Cassius M. Clay [an abolitionist] spoke in Hartford, Connecticut. A few ardent young Republicans accompanied him as a kind of body-guard, and to save their garments from the dripping of the torches, a few of them wore improvised capes of black glazed cambric. The uniforms attracted so much attention that a campaign club-formed in Hartford soon after adopted it. This club called itself the 'Wide-Awakes'."Image
Read 4 tweets
Apr 2
"By requiring academics to profess — and flaunt — faith in DEI, the proliferation of diversity statements poses a profound challenge to academic freedom."

—Randall Kennedy (Harvard Law) 🧵 Image
2)

"DEI statements will essentially constitute pledges of allegiance that enlist academics into the DEI movement by dint of soft-spoken but real coercion: If you want the job or the promotion, play ball — or else." Image
3)

"Playing ball entails affirming that the DEI bureaucracy is a good thing and asking no questions that challenge it, all the while making sure to use in one’s attestations the easy-to-parody DEI lingo. It does not take much discernment to see, moreover, that the diversity statement regime leans heavily and tendentiously towards varieties of academic leftism and implicitly discourages candidates who harbor ideologically conservative dispositions.Image
Read 11 tweets

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