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Guy Emerson Mount Profile picture
Guy Emerson Mount
@GuyEmersonMount
Assistant Professor @WakeForest. PhD @UChicago. Associate Editor @BlkPerspectives. Co-Founder @TheRAUC. Writing a History of the Black Pacific. #Reparations
Aug 13, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
"What if we saw in this data the increasing numbers of racially blended families and mixed-race children – and understood them as signs of a more racially diverse, economically just and culturally rich future? "

This is called mixed race utopianism. It's wack. A quick thread. Since at least the 16th century settler colonial societies in the Americas imagined the mixed race character of the colonies as some kind of futuristic utopian ideal where the bodies of mixed people would somehow magically lead to a more just world (w/o any affirmative politics).
Sep 28, 2020 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
Can we please stop individualizing and moralizing this.

The 'patriotic' state SYSTEMATICALLY subsidizes the 'owners' of stolen land and labor through a variety of police actions and tax incentives.

Receipts below on how to make tons of money in real estate while paying no taxes The IRS has "How to tips" to show accountants and wealthy owners how to avoid taxes. It starts with depreciation. Owners of rental property can offset profits by deducting 3.6% of its purchase price per year for 27.5 years even if the value is going up. irs.gov/publications/p…
Sep 21, 2020 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
"Against State Capture" by @AustinMcCoy3 in @TowardFreedom is THE read of the day. So much insight from one of the most caring scholar activists I know. Avoiding elite capture of this uprising is SO important right now (even as it's already happening). towardfreedom.org/story/against-… "Confrontations with police and attacks on property operate symbiotically with various strategies and tactics that activists and organizations have devised to evade state and electoral capture."---@AustinMcCoy3 on a diversity of tactics.
Sep 8, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Would you believe me if I told you it was even worse?
Enslavers DID know that they were dealing with fully complicated human beings but decided to regard enslaved peoples as chattel anyway in hopes of destroying that very humanity (while reifying their own).
#AuburnWorldHistory For proof of this, think about Mary Prince's diary and how often, how arbitrarily, and how much "pleasure" her enslavers took in beating her. They didn't need to treat their cows that way because there was no human spirit to control, condition, and manipulate. @bethany_hadley1
Sep 4, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Excellent, balanced review by @JRWinters77 in @BlkPerspectives

I'd only add that, in my reading, critics of #Afropessimism who see it as "a death knell for...the kind of hope and energy needed to confront current problems" don't really understand Afropessimism

It's VERY utopian It's certainly pessimistic as it relates to OTHER utopian visions (Pan-Africanism, Marxism, feminism, etc.) but only then as it relates to the question of Black ontologies and the capacity to address antiblackness. Destroying capitalism/sexism is part of destroying the world.
Sep 2, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Black grad students @UChicago are joining the #MoreThanDiversity strike by withholding their labor from diversity committees and refusing to help recruit Black students to campus until the university meets their demands for #abolition and #reparations. docs.google.com/document/d/1DO… The original faculty letter (also calling for abolition and various forms of reparations on and off-campus) can be found here docs.google.com/document/d/1ks…

They also are calling for a full outside boycott of all UChicago sponsored events (seminars, workshops, conferences, etc.).
Aug 5, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Harold Franklin, who integrated #Auburn University in 1964 (and was wrongfully denied his M.A. for half a century by my predecessors at @Auburn_History) has finally received his diploma. He is 87 years old.

Congratulations Dr. Franklin!

wvtm13.com/article/auburn… While this small act of reparative justice can never undo the wrongs that Dr. Franklin experienced at Auburn or in America writ large it will hopefully contribute to new way of being in the world for members of the #Auburn community. When we do wrong we must try to make it right.
Jul 23, 2020 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
Congratulations to the youth, their teachers, and everyone @TheVLAcademy who just succeeded changing the name of Stephen Douglas Park to Frederick Douglass Park! This was an amazing, multiyear campaign of empowerment that I'll provide some links to below. nbcchicago.com/news/local/chi… The campaign started back in 2017 right after @TheRAUC uncovered the University of Chicago's ties to slavery and a teacher at VLA, Bianca Jones, realized that her kids were playing at a park named after a slaveholder. aaihs.org/a-case-for-rep…
Jul 20, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
"The rush to pen departmental and institutional statements of solidarity demonstrated that our existing registers of address were not yet sufficient to the demands of the movement." -@RyanCecilJobson doing what @RyanCecilJobson does. Must read of the day. The idea of the "contingent project of the human" is something Kai and I have been thinking alot about in light of reparations.
Jul 17, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
What is abundantly clear on the South Side of Chicago is that powerful actors are NOT consulting Black communities about actions that should be centering Black lives rather than assuaging white feelings about being associated with white slaveholders. Ms. Sherry has been asking for (and creating) a recontextualization of the Douglas tomb for years by remembering the people he enslaved on his birthday. So rather than celebrate his life, Black Chicago gathers to mourn and talk about how to repair the harm Douglas caused.
Jul 15, 2020 • 22 tweets • 6 min read
While in, one sense, this is certainly cause to celebrate, the devil is always in the details. What the city council is effectively saying is that #reparations for slave racial capitalism requires an INCREASED participation IN slave racial capitalism.

A quick breakdown thread Here is a copy of the full resolution passed by @CityofAsheville's City Council and signed by @EstherManheimer scribd.com/document/46872…
Jul 9, 2020 • 16 tweets • 12 min read
Poor little Dinesh.

Just as wrong & confused as ever. Activists HAVE been targeting the slaveholding legacy of Douglas for years at the University of Chicago (a place he founded in 1856). Two monuments to him there just came down.

A @KevinMKruse style dunk on Douglas/Dinesh For me it all started here with @TheRAUC's piece on @BlkPerspectives detailing the University of Chicago's ties to slavery via Stephen A. Douglas's 3000 acre cotton plantation in Lawrence County, Mississippi. aaihs.org/a-case-for-rep… #Twitterstorians #BlkTwitterstorians
Jul 5, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Must read piece by @garyyounge. My incoming Auburn grad student @MickellCarter is thinking through a similar line right now.Certainly true that European liberals are using the U.S. uprising to deny their own racism while EU activists are doing the opposite theguardian.com/world/2020/jun… While African American culture and politics certainly play an outsized role within the diaspora I do take issue with the idea that "Black America has a hegemonic authority in the black diaspora." Even if we take the colloquial rather than the Gramscian meaning of hegemony...
Jul 4, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
LOL! Just gotta keep that #nationalism thing alive, don't you, CNN? You can almost hear them desperately talking over the newsroom table:

"Come guys we gotta keep this thing going. America's gotta still be great, right? Somehow? Someway?"

#FourthofJuly2020 Image The article itself is even more hilarious. All the ahistorical patriotic misreadings of the founding. "America is bending toward justice." There are still "reasons to wave the flag." Crispus Attucks. ANYTHING to avoid confronting this uprising as a critique of America itself.
Jul 4, 2020 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
My mother-in-law announced that this year for the #FourthofJuly the family is cancelling the Fourth of July...

and Thanksgiving...

forever.

A thread of love and respect to my momma. Now mind you, this woman is the quintessential Black matriarch who loves her family and family gatherings more than anything. She starts planning next year’s Thanksgiving at this year’s Thanksgiving (what family color to wear, the decorations, the theme, etc). Serious thought.
Jun 24, 2020 • 21 tweets • 5 min read
If I've been unusually quiet over the past few weeks it's because my family and I were forced to move in the middle of this pandemic

A quick thread on my quest for #housing, my experiences moving, & why housing is a human right that must be placed beyond the reach of #capitalism As a tenant, I always try to not rent in large corporate owned apartment buildings. It strikes me as slightly less un-ethical to have my labor extracted as rent if it flows to a middle class homeowner rather than some publicly traded REIT or uber-rich family. Both suck but still.
Jun 7, 2020 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
My Sunday:

1pm EST Action in Atlanta (attached)

3pm CST Action in Chicago (virtually organizing w/ @TheRAUC see attached)

3pm CST Organizing meeting for @AlabamaCenter for Reparative Justice

5pm EST Deadline for @BlkPerspectives
piece on Chicago action

Sanity mode engaged. ImageImage And I know I'm not the only one doing this kind of thing. Please be kind, generous, & understanding to one another. Activists scholars & organizers have been working quadruple time for almost 2 weeks now. We're all tired and we're all making mistakes but that's OK. #KeepItGoing
Jun 5, 2020 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
So proud of my department @Auburn_History for moving beyond 'thoughts and prayers' and making tangible reparative gestures of both money & labor.

We will be offering our #reparations to The @AlabamaCenter for Reparative Justice (see thread below).

#GeorgeFloydProtests ImageImage The Center is a partnership between Tuskegee University, Auburn University, & the members of the surrounding communities in Lee & Macon County. It is housed by Tuskegee, funded by Auburn, but governed by people's assemblies comprised of descendants of enslaved peoples in the area
Jun 2, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
If you're in an academic department at a PWI and you're contemplating making a 'statement' if that statement does not include institutional action in the form of #reparations to Black communities, please go find a way to make that happen.

#Twitterstorians
#AcademicTwitter And BTW, reparations can take a number of forms. Cash to Black youth following the @GKMC18 model is fantastic. Abolishing/defunding/disarming your campus police is also fantastic. Donating to Black community organizations is great.Building free housing, transport, food banks etc
May 17, 2020 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
I decided to use the phrase 'halo-halo' in my chapter on Black food culture & citizenship in the Philippines. It literally means 'mix-mix' (which is how I use it) but it's also the name for an AMAZING desert in the Philippines I'm now obsessively tracing historically. #halohalo Image Halo-halo appears to have its origins in the Heian period of classical Japan circa 900. Imperial kings would have ice stored in the winter and shaved for them during the summer. It was called a kakigōri (shaved ice) and eventually evolved into a shirokuma (polar bear).
Mar 9, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Ok serious poll:

You open your mom's refrigerator

There is a plastic yellow container that says "margarine" on it (or sour cream or whatever)

What are the odds that it actually contains margarine. Trying to figure out if this is a generational thing, a class marker, or an idiosyncratic quirk of my family.

My mom owns nothing that you could call 'Tupperware.' Just a drawer full of these. Welcome to the family. Image