"A case can be made that the correct narrative to adopt today is one of unabashed black patriotism—a forthright embrace of American nationalism by black people."
"Is this a venal, immoral, & rapacious bandit-society of plundering white supremacists, founded in genocide & slavery & propelled by capitalist greed, or a good country that affords boundless opportunity to all fortunate enough to enjoy the privileges and...
3/
"...bear the responsibilities of citizenship? Of course, there is some warrant in the historical record for both sentiments, but the weight of the evidence overwhelmingly favors the latter. The founding of the United States of America was a world-historic event...
4/
"...by means of which Enlightenment ideals about the rights of individual persons and the legitimacy of state power were instantiated for the first time in real institutions.
5/
"We have witnessed here in America, since the end of the Civil War, the greatest transformation in the status of a serfdom people (which is, in effect, what blacks became after emancipation) to be found anywhere in world history.
This narrative of human liberty begins...
6/
"...in the incredible trauma of the Civil War, w/ more than 600K dead in a country of 30 million. [... T]he consequence of that war was, together with the 13th, 14th, & 15th Amendments, to make the chattel—the African slaves and their descendants—into citizens.
7/
"To those, like the influential writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who dismiss the American dream as irrelevant to blacks or worse, I would ask, 'Have you noticed what has happened here in the United States in the last century?'
8/
"In 1944, ...the modal occupation for African-American men was farm laborer, & the typical occupation of African-American women was domestic servant. The median family income of blacks relative to whites was about 50%. ... This is within my lifetime.
9/
"In the last 75 years, a vast black middle class has developed. The influence of black people on the culture of America is stunning & has global resonance. Some 40 million strong, black Americans are the richest & most powerful population of African descent on the planet.
10/
"The central issue is a question of narrative. Are we going to look [at] the U.S. as a racist, genocidal, white supremacist, illegitimate force? Or are we going to see it for what it has become over the last 3 centuries: the greatest force for human liberty on the planet?
Read all of Glenn Loury's latest, "The Case for Black Patriotism," here:
👉 POWERFUL & timely essay by @JohnRWoodJr. Read the thread. It's may not be what you expected:
"We do need unity in America. We need peace & order. We need justice & the correcting of genuine social inequities. There is a path to this kind of unity. It is a painful path."
1/19
2/19
"There is a price to be paid for what we sometimes call 'unity.' Sometimes, consciously or not, we use 'unity' to fashion societal arrangements that bury legitimate grievance and social dissent beneath consensus, where they may be comfortably ignored."
3/19
"We may feel polarized in America along the axes of left and right, Black and white. But the core division that must be identified and spoken to in American life is the divide between the privileged and the marginalized—in ways that go beyond what you might think."
"The redefinition of harm infantilizes people of color. I would never let someone else have so much power over my wellbeing that a 'mean tweet' or a mere question...would shake me to my core.
"Robin DiAngelo has made a pretty penny insisting that white people should infantilize black people—and that black people should embrace victimhood (their own fragility)—to coax a racial reckoning."
3/10
"I believe that this ideology's biggest, most dangerous tool is its ever-evolving definition of the most salient word in [DiAngelo's] new book's title: 'harm'."
'Harm' has become an almost ubiquitous term in social justice circles."
Here's where theoretical academic CRT & DiAngelo's pop ideas ultimately lead, in practice.
Is this the path to a harmonious multiethnic USA?
Whole "prayer" in this thread.
1/18
2/18
"Or at least to want to hate them. At least, I want to stop caring about them, individually and collectively. I want to stop caring about their misguided, racist souls, to stop believing that they can be better, that they can stop being racist.
3/18
"I'm not talking about the White antiracist allies who have taken up this struggle against racism w/ their whole lives—the ones who stand vigil for weeks outside jails where Black women are killed; who show up in Charlottesville & Ferguson & Baltimore & Pasadena...
"The same laws that we used to combat segregated water fountains, are the same laws that we can use to fight against segregation that typically happens under a critical race theory regime."
@IanVRowe's testimony before the Rhode Island State Legislature.
A short thread.
1/6
2/6
"Less than 1/2 of RI’s white students in the 8th grade scored proficient in reading. Closing the black to white achievement gap, w/o improving outcomes for all students, would mean black student outcomes would grow from sub-mediocrity to full-mediocrity in terms of reading."
3/6
"American institutions are enforcing a cynical & intolerant orthodoxy. This orthodoxy requires us to view each other based on immutable characteristics like skin color, gender and sexual orientation. It pits us against one another, and diminishes what it means to be human."
"Political blackness was born in [an] era where 'coloureds were treated as part of a de facto underclass. Institutional racism meant they occupied menial jobs, were denied decent housing and education and were excluded...
1/10
2/10
"...from many social spaces due to the 'colour bar'.
In this context, it made sense for descendants of Britain’s colonies to band together.
But political blackness is now a fossil. [I]t flattens out the diffs btw blacks & S. Asians into an abstract non-white identity.
3/10
"At the same time, the emergence of identity politics has had the effect of breaking up what was once a unified 'black struggle' into ethnic & religious fragments.
The Tories are the political group best equipped to appeal to an increasingly diverse electorate.