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."

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…

"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) 🧵 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."

"Tonight, I learned the name of Alderman would be removed from Alderman Library. I became a student scholar at Alderman Library. ... This is not the first time a part of me, my cherished memories, have been 'disrupted' by ideologues.

—Winkfield Twyman 🧵 2)

"When you change parts of my memory, you are sending a message to my generation. You are signaling the awesome positive race stories of the 1970s and 1980s are less important than dishonoring 18th century slaveholding families and segregationists before the Civil Rights Era.

Guys like Kareem will never stop pretending that there are grave doubts about Roland Fryer's study showing lack of racial bias in police shootings.

Here are SIX additional studies, using different data sets and different methodologies, that show the exact same result. 🧵

https://twitter.com/kareem_carr/status/1758918102702567586

2)

Pre-Fryer:

"what the data does suggest is that eliminating the biases of all police officers would do little to materially reduce the total number of African-American killings.
...
African-Americans have a very large number of encounters with police officers. Every police encounter contains a risk. ...having more encounters with police officers, even with officers entirely free of racial bias, can create a greater risk of a fatal shooting."

—@m_sendhil (Roman Family University Professor of Computation and Behavioral Science at Chicago Booth)

"The demand that Gay resign stems from the utter lack of moral competency she displayed in her testimony before Congress, in which she said that calling for the genocide of Jews is only against @Harvard rules in certain contexts. There is also now evidence of serial plagiarism.🧵 2)

"Having finally got their wish of a Black president of Harvard, Harvard seems unwilling to let her go. The racial wagons have circled around Gay, with President of the @NAACP alleging that White Supremacy is afoot and @Morehouse President David Thomas claiming in a Forbes interview that Gay is a scholar at the 'top of her profession...as qualified as any President Harvard has ever had.'

🧵As part of a self-declared jihad which lasted from 1983 to 2005, Sudanese Arabs sought to subjugate and enslave the Black Sudanese of the mostly Christian South. The onslaught cost the lives of perhaps 2.5 million Black Sudanese and the freedom of an estimated 200,000 more. 1/9 2/9 In Israel, Hamas burned homes to force people out of shelters; in Sudan, the terrorists set fire to train cars and then murdered those who tried to escape. Rizeigat Arabs kidnapped children; one Arab, according to the report, stabbed a woman & snatched her 4-month-old baby.

WOKE ACTIVISTS USE PICTURE BOOKS TO INDOCTRINATE BLACK CHILDREN

🧵𝑆𝑜 𝑤𝑒 𝑝𝑢𝑡 𝑡𝑜𝑔𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑜𝑤𝑛 𝑝𝑖𝑐𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒 𝑏𝑜𝑜𝑘 𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑠 𝑦𝑜𝑢'𝑙𝑙 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑛 𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑒 𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑐𝑒𝑙𝑒𝑏𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑑𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑦.

The world understands how powerful black voices are. This is why the radical progressive movement targets black children. Save this list and come back to it when looking for enriching stories that won’t corrupt your children while still featuring black characters. 1/24






2/24 The criteria to be on this list is as follows:

1. No radical progressive agenda
2. Tell a good story
3. Not be about racism, woke lens or not

JUST SAY NO TO ANTIRACIST BABY!

The full breakdown drops tomorrow in the Journal of Free Black Thought. Here is your preview👇

WHAT HAPPENED TO BLACK MATERNAL HEALTH

🧵If you want to get down to the bottom of the black maternal health crisis we hear so much about you must study what is happening right now and what happened in the past. Black midwives are a major piece of this puzzle. 1/26 2/26 𝐹𝑜𝑙𝑘𝑠 𝐷𝑜 𝐺𝑒𝑡 𝐵𝑜𝑟𝑛 (1946) is mandatory reading for anyone interested in understanding the current situation in maternal health. This book is no longer in print and a used copy will run you at least $200 on Amazon. We'll hit the high points in this thread.

BLACK MASCOTS FOR A RED REVOLUTION

🧵Exploring the ways in which black Americans have been the targets of Marxist rhetoric. We frequently hear commentators blame universities but this has been going on in high schools for decades. 1/13 2/13 One cannot successfully assess the critical theory and Marxist ideas entrapping many of our black youth and young people generally without acknowledging Howard Zinn.

"The...utopian view of the human condition [is] the belief that there are no inherent limits to what mankind can accomplish, so trade-offs are unnecessary. World peace is achievable. Social problems such as poverty, crime and racism can be not merely managed but eliminated. 🧵 @jasonrileywsj 2)

"Mr. Sowell begins 'Social Justice Fallacies' with a quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who expressed the essence of the unconstrained vision when he wrote of 'the equality which nature established among men and the inequality which they have instituted among themselves.'

"Someone needs to keep pointing out that our national debate over which books to allow in classrooms, or how to teach slavery to middle-schoolers, is far less consequential than the continuing inability of most youngsters to read or do math at grade level. 🧵 2)

"In FL, where DeSantis has taken lumps for a couple sentences in a 200-page black-history curriculum, only 39% of Miami-Dade County 4th-graders are proficient in reading. Who cares if kids have access to books by Toni Morrison if most of them can’t comprehend the contents?

"Identitarians on the Right and the Left share a common hostility to the working class and 'radical forms of universalism.' The 1619 and 1776 projects exemplify this. They reject class struggle, the class analytic, and universal social programs." 🧵

2/

"The class politics that inform both projects are remarkably similar. The 1776 and 1619 projects are united in their reverence for capitalist social property relations, despite their disagreement about how the state should respond to the inequalities they produce."

Charles Blow's (@CharlesMBlow) column "reveals how supposed liberals, the sort that religiously read the @nytimes, can smuggle reactionary racialist ideas under the apparently progressive language of racial justice and empowerment."

🧵 on a response piece by @buffsoldier_96...

https://twitter.com/nytopinion/status/1692615007660376095

@CharlesMBlow @nytimes @buffsoldier_96 2/

"Blow’s proposition assumes that 'black people' form an actual political constituency that speaks in one voice, when there are all sorts of fissures and cleavages that exist within 'black politics.' To not recognise this is to have a meagre understanding of diversity."

"I taught a class [in which we read] Shelby Steele’s objections to affirmative action. It stigmatizes Black people as inferior & fills them with self-doubt in a mostly white setting; it makes them trade on their past of victimization; it doesn't improve life for most" of them. 🧵 2)

"When I asked my students what they thought, one of the more activist-minded among them said that he agreed with everything that Steele said about affirmative action, which he thought shamed Black people. But, he added, with strong emotion, 'I hate Steele for saying it.'"

"The Supreme Court outlawed the use of race-based affirmative action in college admissions. I’d personally come to believe that preferences focused on socioeconomic factors—wealth, income, neighborhood—would accomplish more good while requiring less straightforward unfairness. 🧵

2/

"As an academic who is also Black, I have seen up close, over decades, what it means to take race into account. I talked about some of these experiences in interviews and in a book I wrote in 2000, but I’ve never shared them in an article like this one.

FBT's work has been cited in a lawsuit by former Penn State Prof. Zack De Piero, who was told to “assure that all students see that white supremacy manifests itself in language and in writing pedagogy” and that “There is a problem with the White race.” 🧵

https://t.co/YdbnXXsVdLfairforall.org/penn-state/
2)

De Piero's lawsuit against Penn State cites FBT's work to claim that "over 80% of Latinos and a nearly equal % of African Americans respond, 'That is not offensive' when presented with the question, 'Where are you from.'"

The post cited in the suit:
https://t.co/t5jDpOpno6freeblackthought.substack.com/p/the-best-mic…

"We’re going through a period of extreme despair about the situation of African-Americans. The most extreme form is a movement called Afropessimism, which holds that black Americans are still viewed, as in the slavery days, as inferior, and as outsiders."

—Orlando Patterson🧵 2)

"I find myself in an odd situation because the Afropessimists draw heavily on one of my books, 'Slavery and Social Death,' which is ironic, because I’m not a pessimist. I don’t think we’re in a situation of social death, because one of the elements of social death is that...

"'What I learned is that we as black people are still not free. Reparations can help close the wealth gap but instead the gov’t and other citizens feels like they don’t owe anything.'

—Black high school student who took "Reparations Math," a curriculum from the 1619 Project. @IanVRowe 2/

The 1619 Project high school math curriculum "outlines explicit objectives to have students use different mathematical equations to 'suggest steps the U.S. government can take to provide financial reparations.'"

Economist @SandyDarity "reckons that it will cost between $13 and $14 trillion to repair the financial harm of excluding Black Americans from full citizenship in the US for some 247 years. ... 🧵 @SandyDarity 2/

"Darity says that the racial wealth gap that persists to this day for those whose ancestors were enslaved must be remedied by raising the level of Black assets to a level sufficient to match the average net worth of white Americans.

"Progressives insist that there is a direct link between the past mistreatment of blacks and black outcomes today, but that claim is undermined by the experience of other groups. Chinese- and Japanese-Americans were also mistreated in the U.S. ... 🧵 2/

"Chinese- and Japanese-Americans were lynched, placed in internment camps, forced to attend segregated schools and denied property rights. Yet today both Asian groups outperform white Americans academically and economically and have done so for decades.

"I don't think Libertarians should be cultural warriors. I'm not for a canon, I'm not for 1619, it was so flawed, it was trauma porn, in my mind. The only thing that made me lessen my criticism about 1619 was [Trump's] 1776."

— @citizenstewart on education 🧵 @citizenstewart 2/

"On the left, I think the woke stuff goes too far when it goes into territory where measurements don't matter anymore. It doesn't matter whether the kids are learning as long as they're getting introduced to movies that show Che Guevara and blah blah blah, right?"