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Marco Rogers Profile picture
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18 Jun, 4 tweets, 1 min read
"I know this is existentially important. But we can't do anything hard unless you make it fun."

I will never understand this argument from grown ass adults.
I don't care about the cruise. Do whatever makes you feel good. But fixing your mouth to say "the messaging about climate change is a downer"? That is wild to me.

"Let's talk about the end of human civilization. But make it festive!"
I had a conversation with a white friend recently. She said a lot of white people never develop the ability to "metabolize" pain and trauma. Because they've built a whole culture around avoiding it. They don't have the tools. That has really stuck with me.
So instead they spend tremendous amounts of energy trying to rationalize it, pretend it didn't happen, turn it into something that sounds positive. Anything except facing reality with the appropriate amount of seriousness.

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More from @polotek

Marco Rogers Profile picture
18 Jun
Let me try one more time to frame this in the right way. The opposition decided to vote for this because they believe they can work to *make it into* a meaningless gesture. It is for us to decide whether they will succeed at that.
What I'm trying to get people to understand is that the way we talk about these thing actually matters. If you've already decided this is meaningless, then it is. These things will never have more meaning than what we assign to it. There is no magic. There is only ourselves.
If you need someone else to tell you that this has meaning, then guess what? It doesn't actually have meaning to you. That's okay. But own that and spend some time interrogating that. You can't expect others to engage with something when you have not done that for yourself.
Read 8 tweets
Marco Rogers Profile picture
17 Jun
There's a lot of discourse around Juneteenth as a national holiday. Whether it "matters" or whether it's just a "symbolic gesture". I just don't see those things as mutually exclusive. Of course symbolism matters. If it doesn't, why have we been tearing down monuments?
Does this victory mean the fight is over? Of course not.

Will Whiteness try to paint it that way anyway? Of course it will.

Will this change white people's minds overnight? Of course not.

Will it have a meaningful impact over time. Yes of course.
Should we see more substantive policy change along with this? Absolutely yes.

Is it a problem that we didn't get policy change along with this. Yes, it is.

Should we have *stopped* this *because* it didn't come with more substantive policy change? That is a debate worth having.
Read 8 tweets
Marco Rogers Profile picture
17 Jun
It wasn't a... moment. It went on for hundreds of years.
I don't know. White people are always going to show us how dedicated they are to lying to themselves in order to justify their continued dominance. I expect that. The only question I keep asking today is when are we going to gain the fortitude to remove those people from power.
When is racism going to become something that actually disqualifies you from gaining power over the lives of others?
Read 7 tweets
Marco Rogers Profile picture
15 Jun
I don't have a lot to say about Kevin Hart in particular. There's something important to me about this cultural moment that has nothing to do with him. He is the same. There is a large part of the population who has grown and changed. We are different. And that's a good thing.
We talk a lot about what it means to learn and grow. To a lot of people, it's just lip service. But there are folks who are serious about changing themselves and the environment around them to cause less harm. And it's having an impact.
It's important that we keep perspective though. This path towards addressing the harmful parts of our culture is a very big shift. The more successful we are at this, the more upheaval and angst and opposition we should expect. That is the nature of change.
Read 6 tweets
Marco Rogers Profile picture
12 Jun
For me this brings to mind something I've been reading about in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire goes into detail on what he calls the "banking model" of education. Where students are empty vessels that we deposit knowledge into.
This is the style that has become dominant in Western education. Freire explains why and how it serves to support and maintain systems of oppression. The teacher is held as an infallible actor. And the way students learn is by deferring to the teacher on all things.
First off, we can see how this model of uni-directional passing of knowledge supports this statement of one teacher for 300-400 students. The students have no say in their education. There's no interaction. They're just absorbing input from the teacher.
Read 8 tweets
Marco Rogers Profile picture
11 Jun
This is worth highlighting as a feature of both imperialism and Whiteness. The fundamental belief that there is no objective morality. And instead right and wrong are defined by who you are. As a result, morality becomes a function of who has more power.
This is what we're getting at when we say "history is written by the winners". It's not a simple statement. It's about how those with power actively rewrite the rules of morality to serve themselves.
"When the president does it, it's not illegal."

We see this throughout history. Part of what it means to be in power is having the ability to absolve yourself of accountability. Historically, morally, legally, economically, socially. You can literally do no wrong.
Read 6 tweets

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