I mean, Reagan appointed Clarence Thomas to be Chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and nominated Robert Bork for SCOTUS. What more do you need to know?

Or, maybe just listen to our first Black Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall. In 1987 he was 1/
2/ asked by columnist Carl T. Rowan to “rate some of the Presidents and their impact on racial justice in his lifetime,” specifically, “”What about Ronald Reagan?”; Marshall’s response was devastating:

"Justice Marshall: 'The bottom.'

Mr. Rowan: 'The bottom?'
3/ "Justice Marshall: 'Honestly. I think he’s down with Hoover and that group. Wilson. When we really didn’t have a chance.'

Mr. Rowan: 'Yet he’s been one of the most popular Presidents the country ever had in the polls.'
4/4 "Justice Marshall: 'Is he more popular than the average movie star?'"

Dang.

nytimes.com/1987/09/09/us/…

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More from @AlsoACarpenter

25 Oct
A small portion of Reagan's civil rights retrenchment:

"Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (calling it 'humiliating to the South'), and ran for governor of California in 1966 promising to wipe the Fair Housing Act off the books. 1/
2/ "'If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house,' he said, 'he has a right to do so.' After the Republican convention in 1980, Reagan travelled to the county fair in Neshoba, Mississippi, where, in 1964, three Freedom Riders
3/ "had been slain by the Ku Klux Klan. Before an all-white crowd of tens of thousands, Reagan declared: 'I believe in states' rights'.

As president, Reagan aligned his justice department on the side of segregation, supporting the fundamentalist Bob Jones University in its case
Read 5 tweets
24 Oct
While considering the supposedly hyper political state of the current American church, I suggest that we be careful not to fall into the error of believing there is such thing as an apolitical church, nor into attempting to somehow politically neutralize the church.

For 1/
2/ example, as U.S. churches and denominations were splitting over the political issue of slavery in the 1850s and 60s, many of the fiercest defenders of slavery also complained of the churches transgressing their mission and entering to politics by condemning slavery.
3/ See, e.g., Presbyterian minister James Henley Thornwell, an ardent apologist for the Southern institution of slavery. Thornwell was deeply involved in the national debate over slavery and between Old and New School American Presbyterians. In 1851 he authored a report
Read 21 tweets
22 Oct
I was giving a presentation on CRT a bit back, and one of the participants said that he'd never heard it explained that way, and if CRT really was what I was saying, then why are none of the louder public voices explaining it that way? My answer was, they very much are! But 1/
2/ few, it is clear, care to actually listen to real CRT scholars. Further, if you keep going to Fox News, Breitbart, National Review, The Federalist, Christian bloggers, etc., to get your info on CRT, then of course you're only going to hear the hair-raising BS explanations.
3/ CRT scholars have been working tirelessly to correct the record on their work; the problem is the lack of amplifiers and listeners.

So, in order to demonstrate this, here are a list of popular level articles published for popular access that we COULD all accept as verified
Read 13 tweets
4 Aug
When “objective truth” is contrasted with “socially constructed truth,” the contrast is NOT between the existence of truth as such and multiple-“truths,” experiential “truths,” or private/subjective “truths,” but between truths that are discoverable in the world as 1/
2/ (more or less) independent of social formation, social habitualization, and social institutionalization; that is, truth that is not contingent on a network of historically constructed social meanings. This is why mathematics and science are often considered to deal in
3/ "objective truth" whereas social sciences largely deal in socially constructed truths, viz., truths dependent upon networks of social meanings. 

Further, in CRT, this debate is almost ALWAYS in the context of determining truth legal storytelling. It's extremely important to
Read 6 tweets
24 Jul
Requiring one to answer, "Are you for CRT or against CRT?" (or "align with," "accept," etc.) as though it were a tightly defined logical unit with every truth a theorem, is a tactic, a polemic maneuver that makes no sense when discussing social and legal theory. 1/
2/ And this kind of wholesale requirement to accept or reject only applies to cultural bogeyman. You are not, for example, required to "accept or reject" capitalism, but you are required to "accept or reject" Marxism.

Isn't it weird to say, "are you for or against Legal
3/ Realism??" or "are you for or against symbolic interactionism??"

We simply don't think that way about broad theoretical traditions, with various different approaches and continued internal debate, like all social and legal theories.
Read 5 tweets
23 Jul
I wish we could say everything's changed. Hear Dr. King describing 2021 in 1968:

"The persistence of racism in depth and the dawning awareness that Negro demands will necessitate structural changes in society have generated a new phase of white resistance in North and South. 1/
2/ "Based on the cruel judgment that Negroes have come far enough, there is a strong mood to bring the civil rights movement to a halt or reduce it to a crawl. Negro demands that yesterday evoked admiration and support, today—to many—have become tiresome, unwarranted and a
3/ "disturbance to the enjoyment of life. Cries of Black Power and riots are not the causes of white resistance, they are consequences of it."

Just think, our present predicament had already begun in Dr. King's lifetime. Ugh.
Read 4 tweets

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