President Folt, rather than apologizing for betraying the trust of our students by subjecting them to violent assaults by the LAPD, lies to cover her unconscionable actions—I was personally present & tweeted live from the start of the protests. Here’s the easily provable truth 🧵

It’s a brazen lie to say “people were assaulted” or “critical academic buildings blocked” by the peaceful students I stood w/ before the administration unleashed riot cops with guns, clubs, cuffs & pepper spray on students. The administration cannot lie its way out of this mess.

This critique of Critical Race Theory (CRT), like so many of its ilk, is muddled and filled with tendentious assertions masquerading as factual descriptions. It tries to disparage the academic integrity of CRT by grossly oversimplifying it, then conflating it w/ “pop antiracism.” The author claims his critique of CRT centers on the “seminal texts” of “early critical race theorists,” a group of scholars writing from the time of Bell’s early work—the mid-1970s—through the time of Ian Haney Lopez’s early pieces, which first appear in the mid- to late-1990s.

My #DerekChauvinSentencing remarks for news shows on Friday have earned me condemnation in some circles and support in others. Ibram X. Kendi (author of How To Be An Antiracist) and I, for instance, took opposite positions when commenting on Chauvin’s sentence for @CBSNLive. Kendi’s position—shared by most everyone—was that Chauvin should get maximum punishment. His rationale: if Chauvin were Black, he’d get severe punishment (as I show in N*gga Theory, courts do mete out more draconian sentences to Blacks), so punish him with that level of severity.

Chauvin’s status as a cop magnifies the gravity of his harm, so it’s certainly an aggravating factor. But intentionally inflicting twice as much suffering on him for that reason in the name of retribution reinforces a punitive moral framework that hurts more blacks than it helps.

https://twitter.com/crownvictoria22/status/1408573852846891012

If Chauvin had been sentenced to the presumptive 12.5 years, he would have had to serve at least 8.25 years (assuming good behavior), and most if not all of that time will be spent in “isolation for his own safety,” i.e., solitary, which @amnesty rightly recognizes as torture.

I’m taking a very unpopular position on #DerekChauvinSentencing, the same position I take on the appropriate punishment for violent wrongdoers and “moral monsters” in N*gga Theory—namely, we must resist seeking to gratify our retributive urge to maximize their punishment. “I would hope that Judge Cahill sentences Chauvin to the maximum amount of time in prison,” a civil rights lawyer & activist said recently in a public forum held by the Legal Rights Center, a nonprofit group that provides indigent defense and advocates criminal justice reform.

Alexander claims in “The New Jim Crow” that the US went from 300,000 incarcerated people in 1980 to over 2.2 million by 2010 by arresting and locking up low-level non-violent drug offenders. This is simply factually false. As Marc Mauer, John Pfaff and others point out...

https://twitter.com/incogneattow/status/1296844959992012801

Most prisoners in state prisons (where 87% of US prisoners reside) are not there for low-level non-violent drug offenses. Good estimates put the percentages of such prisoners in state prisons at around 5-6%, at most. Most people in prison are there for violent or serious offenses

My JUNETEENTH reflections, delivered for @USC’s Juneteenth celebration this morning & to be delivered on the steps of LA City Hall later today:

On Juneteenth, we celebrate the deliverance of black bodies from America’s bondage. When I think of black bodies in bondage, I first think of my own dad, literally & figuratively a big black patriot: a six foot eight-inch barrel-chested black veteran of the 2nd World War & proud Marine who, in the words of America the Beautiful—“more than self his country loved”

My Veterans Day thoughts center on my dad, this proud black Marine on the right, a patriotic American who fought Nazis for his country in WWII, only to have his own country turn on him after he returned, wrongfully sentencing him in 1968 to 22-55 years for pot possession & sale. Standing 6 feet 8 inches tall, weighing 260 pounds, eloquent, successful in business, & flouting all the racial restrictions of his day, my barel-chested dad towered like a black Gulliver over the lily-white Lilliputians—call ‘em Lily-putians—in law enforcement who resented him.

I enjoyed talking to these great @usc undergrads & profs about free speech & academic freedom, for which I’m a fierce advocate: Black & other socially marginalized dissidents wind up bearing the brunt of crackdowns on transgressive utterances by status quo defenders & apologists. Understandably, many find the N-word I deploy in my scholarship offensive & dehumanizing—a form of “hate speech.” For them, the word’s deeply racist roots make any & all current-day uses of it tainted fruit of the poisonous tree. The NAACP formally buried it in Detroit in 2006!