This man's mom is a doctor and his dad is an engineer, and now he is running around telling people that anyone can make it in America.

That's fine, but he can't tie that to his story because he is not anyone.

foxnews.com/media/vivek-ra… Apparently, he is a sold tennis player and pianist. That's great. With hard work, you can be a great tennis player. And with hard work, you can be a great pianist. But 100% of the people who are both have well-resourced, in tact families from stable communities.

Everytime I hear a conservative woman talk about submitting to her husband, I think, "You don't want a spouse, you want to be adopted." Also, that kind of talk screws up the job market for any woman who even LOOKS like you, because employers don't want to hire, invest in and train someone, just to have them quit because their husband says so.

Mechanisms of the Will (A Thread):
A lot of what we do is to throw off the yoke of powerful external determinations. We want to live a self-determinted life, not an externally determined life. This is why property is so important. We want to be able to express our wills through how we dispose of objects in the world, including our body, but also objects that are external to us, our stuff.

I'm just saying, we told upper middle class White women that they've had it hard because they were women, and I'm pretty sure that's been bad for everyone else who has it worse then upper middle class White women, which is just about everyone else. The notion that womanhood doesn't confer substantive perks to upper middle class White women has screwed up the liberal side of US politics in terms of race, gender, AND class.

When we did our five minutes about debt peonage in high school, I learned that many Blacks couldn't leave until they paid off their debts, which was hard to do.

But here is how it went down...(thread) Slaves were freed without assets, so they had to take a job with an owner. The planter would either rent out a plot for the slave to work, or allow the slave to work a plot, with equipment and furnishings on loan, against future crops.

She added sex to the Civil Rights legislation of 1964 in order to protect White women from the justice claims of Black women. (And White women have been dining out on those claims ever since.)

Functionally, what this bit of "gender progress" does is redirect resources and attention back into White communities. You can find the entire video here:

c-span.org/video/?444214-…

You have to appreciate how Congressperson Griffiths comes out of the gate with how the most important movement in the women's movement was cannibalizing the Civil Rights Legislation meant for Black people.

(2:30)

c-span.org/video/?444214-… They double down at 9:03. I don't understand how anyone can avoid the argument that gender is racialized when White women added gender to avoid being outcompeted by Black women.

Griffiths didn't have to put White women in the bill because gender is so deeply racialized.

Two bits:

1) McGhee is one of those Black folks White liberals love because she consistently focuses on how White people will benefit from anti-racist efforts.

It's also ultimately useless because she doesn't honestly reckon with what they'll lose.

nytimes.com/2022/09/01/opi… 2) A tertiary point is the way these pieces confuse the discourse by playing on a false dichotomy. The purpose of education is to make citizens, but being a good citizen entails being a good member of civil society, family member, and moral agent. So...

The pro-choice position may be more popular, but the pro-Life position is better organized, with organizations that are meaningfully integrated in our lives.
It's like an all-star basketball player playing against three recreational league players. In theory, it's 3 on 1, but... The thing is, people can say, "The pro-choice lobby needs to get organized." But it's not that simple, especially because liberals are anti-intellectual, anti-historical, and anti-institutional in relevant ways.

We need to expand our political talk to include Constitutional Amendments.

"'The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,' Alito wrote, "
newyorker.com/news/daily-com… Alito is right. The REASON he is right is because the country was designed for propertied White men to rule with each other over all other residents.

This is why it's important to understand the Constitution as an historical document, a second draft (Arts. of Conf. was first.)

Listen, the Dems don't like working for your vote.

The Supreme Court makes it so they don't have to.

A SCOTUS ruling repealing Roe is great news for all of your favorite Democrats. They get to be relevant without ticking off any of their big $$$ donor base or vacation buddies. Every Dem consultant in Washington can now breathe a sigh of relief.

SCOTUS is poised to hand them job security, without even asking them to think through any political solutions concerning labor and racial justice.

One reason I'd like reparations is that I wouldn't mind Black great grandkids.

"Then you should have married a Black woman."

And end up divorced when I lost my job? No thanks. Black guys are out their losing jobs and being served divorce papers the same week. Even Obama was on the chopping block, and he went on to become a whole US President.

Nah, fam, the best way to end up with Black great grands is to fight for reparations today.

news.yahoo.com/michelle-obama…

Irami Subbing in for a Class: You have to put your phone away.

Student: I'm just texting my brother to X, Y, Z.

Irami: This is how a distorted notion of the family is screwing up your ability to fill your civil and political responsibilities.... In the time before phones, we didn't have to worry about it or be intentional about how these differentiated arenas of freedom mutually enforce or negate each other, but now here we are, which means that we have to talk about how distorted notions of family can be the root of...

There is this idea among the White Left that elite business interests tricked working class Whites into subverting democratic institutions, enabling oligarchy, all for the sake of racism.

Working class Whites weren't tricked. They decided to give up democracy for racism. Don't underestimate the EFFORT that is put in by Whites to sustain a racial hierarchy.

If you don't see the institutionalized and personal effort that goes into sustaining racism in the South, you aren't going to be serious about the effort it takes to dismantle it.

In technical terms. Liberalism tends towards the idea that self-determination comes from choosing between given options. That means that the content of the option you take on is still alien to you. You aren't determining yourself; you are choosing between alien determinations.

https://twitter.com/IramiOF/status/1511435520508932106

Smalls is making a stronger argument that self-determination is a matter of co-determining the content of the options among which you choose, not just choosing between the crappy options as they are given to you.

White women are the White men of public education. Folks underestimate the tax that comes with dealing with a room full of White women about schools.

And make no mistake, they are like mosquitoes. 3 or 4, in a room of 20, is already a room full of them.

I'm trying to explain Bell's argument about how the fight for racial equality is an unrealistic one. It's like a starting punt returner and a starting running back expecting to score the same number of touchdowns over the course of the season. Sure, the punt returner may get hot and the running back cold, but the game isn't structured for the punt returner to end with more touchdowns. It's an unrealistic goal. It's never happened, and there are good reasons to believe that it never will.

Now @krystalball and @esaagar have emancipated themselves from Rising, I can tell you about the segment I cut on John Lewis that didn't air. It was in response to Bill Clinton saying at Lewis' funeral, paraphrase, "thank you for saving us from Kwame Ture/Stokely Carmichael" @krystalball @esaagar Lewis' real legacy wasn't in the civil rights movement, but in SELLING the CRM to company Dems. But you can't sell what you don't own, so he took exclusive ownership of the CRM to sell it to Clinton for the low price of a lifetime's worth of awards ceremonies put on by the DNC.

The prominence of Critical Theory is a gift.
I remember 2006 when social thinkers were ready to hand the store to economists. (And political questions were obviously best answered by Bill Gates' Foundation.) The idea was that economists had special access to a formal method so if everyone thought like an economist, the world would be a better, more rational place.

A standing frustration with white liberal feminism is that they don't acknowledge what it means that we have an entire cultural infrastructure that has gendered and normalized the idea that some private other person can be primarily responsible for paying and securing their life. It would be one thing if the movement were honest about what the option to sell your ass for a McMansion means. Not that women should or have to do that, but that they CAN fundamentally distorts that class of women's labor politics. Conservatives are MUCH more honest about this.

“an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”
The state does not care of Black kids are distressed by lies. (This isn't about White kids; it's about White parents.)
tinyurl.com/22x9rfsj "Board member Kenneth Mason, who is Black, gave one of two dissenting votes.

'The statement, when I read it, made me feel like I didn’t belong because it excused the existence of racism in my life, in my two children’s life,'"

To be clear, the default is distressed Black kids.