She asked if I'd seen it, and I said I had, and we had a little chat about it. We were both struck by the way that conservatives combine reverence for founding documents with aggressive ignorance about the circumstances in which those documents were written.
That was the premise of this thread, which I was called an anti-white racist more than once for tweeting.
Remember that the three-fifths compromise wasn't a compromise about the rights of enslaved people—enslaved people were considered zero fifths of a person under it, not three.
It was about how much extra power slaveowners would be given compared to OTHER WHITE PEOPLE.
Under the three-fifths compromise, a white person in states where slavery was legal counted as more of a person for the purposes of representation than a white person in a state where it was illegal.
Every once in a while one of my students will say "slaves only counted as three-fifths of a person," and I'll just stop the class dead and say "That's not true. The truth is actually much much worse than that" and then go on from there.
My college has one lecture hall. On the entire campus. Most classrooms seat about 30 comfortably in non-covid times, 40 if you push it. No way to do social distancing for in-class instruction without folding in Zoom for the majority of students.
And we're a commuter campus, which means no dorms. At all. So everyone's going back to families, kids, parents, housemates, etc. And most students AND faculty are arriving on public transportation.
One thing to note about Andrew Sullivan's ongoing race-realism rant, now dozens if not hundreds of tweets long: He hasn't used the word "Black" once in it yet.
There are some quiet parts he's still unwilling to say out loud.
And just to make this really explicit, Blackness is central to Andrew Sullivan's interest in race. Search his timeline for "African," and you'll see him going on and on about Black violence just a few days ago.
Yep. As a vaccinated person I'm doing basically the same thing. Double-masking when indoors, particularly in crowded or constricted spaces or for extended periods, a light cloth or surgical mask outside.
I pretty much assume I'd be pretty much safe outdoors without a mask at this point, but other people don't know I'm vaxed, and some have a different risk tolerance than me, so I haven't devoted much thought to the question. Because being considerate is a sufficient justification.
If there's nobody anywhere near me and I've got good lines of sight so I know nobody's going to stumble across me suddenly, I'll take my mask out when I'm outside, too.
Andrew Sullivan's tweets from today are really quite breathtaking—he spent the evening both attacking people for claiming he believes in innate racial differences in intelligence and mocking people for suggesting that innate racial differences in intelligence don't exist.
I may do a detailed exegesis of this stuff later, but just go look. I defy anyone to construct a coherent narrative of the affirmative case Sullivan is making about race and intelligence out of the stuff he said on here today.
None of this is new with him, but usually he lets a bit of time elapse between the "I'm not a racist" rants and "if you don't believe in innate racial difference you don't believe in science" rants. Tonight he did both at the same time, and it's really something to see.