My opinion: I think the decline in the humanities due to the exact opposite of “lack of exposure.” Students are actually saturated with the humanities. High school requirements are typically 4 years of English, several history courses, and years of foreign language. 1/N

https://twitter.com/guyinblackhat/status/1720719740811857954

Humanities courses are typically the most likely to be transferred in with AP and with dual enrollment (taking college courses in high school). For better or worse, we have designed secondary education in a way that selects the humanities first due to the existing exposure. 2/N

Recall “the habitual be” and how Black people are mocked for a sophisticated linguistic structure that includes a conjugation of the verb “to be” that goes beyond the limits of English and has tangible, identifiable meaning. They use it instead to humiliate our children. 1/N Evidence is clear that Black children understand the conjunction of “to be” at a point in time versus “to be” as a normal state. For someone to say “Trevon be on they necks” does not mean I’m doing so right now, but is something I do habitually. It’s sophisticated and nuanced 2/N

The bottom line: Elite private universities do NOT have a land grant mission. They were not created to be engines of social mobility, provide opportunity to disadvantaged students, or serve the broader public. They are exclusive finishing schools.

Stop asking dogs to fly. 1/N Elite schools educate a very, very small number of college students, but have an outsized impact on perceptions of higher education. Most higher education in America is open admissions (or nearly so) and the best of these DO serve as economic mobility engines. 2/N

Watching Black conservatives confront the naked racism of their fellow travelers is fascinating. Murray is upset at teenagers because they’ve defied his belief that Black people are incapable of high cognition. Yet Black conservatives must give him the benefit of the doubt.

https://twitter.com/delanosquires/status/1653152292697264128

The level of naïveté required to believe that Murray is anything other than a racist who is so angered by any evidence of Black achievement that he argues it must be (1) not true and (2) a product of media manipulation is mind boggling. But here we are.

https://twitter.com/delanosquires/status/1653164150862774273

Recently, I've been working on gender and American enslavement. Inspired by @sejr_historian's brilliant work, I want to quantify the propensity of White women to be active as economic agents in the market for enslaved people. Preliminary results are in! Buckle up!! A 🧵 1/N We know that enslavement was an area where White women overcame coverture. For example, Mississippi was the first state to allow married women property rights in their own name in 1839. Four of the 5 sections of the Act specifically referred to rights to own slaves. 2/N

Another short thread on letters: A tenure/promotion letter need not be long to be effective. Rather than summarizing every paper, tell us who this candidate is as a researcher-- what is their substantive/methodological contribution? What have you learned from them? 1/N Do you teach their papers in your courses? If so, why? The department/university knows all about the papers and the results in each one, what we do not know is how this fits a scholarly profile. Is this work at the cutting edge (journal placement does NOT tell us that)? 2/N

No words.

https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1640408965015060480

We are all tired of the worship of “guns at any cost” as expressive freedom when in actuality they keep us in terror.

https://twitter.com/noliewithbtc/status/1640407152098459668

Just finished reading @KidadaEWilliams “I Saw Death Coming” and it is a MAJOR contribution to the history of Reconstruction. It adds important dimensions to the narrative and takes us away from the concept of “failure” and moves us to the (more accurate) concept of “terror” 1/N Most histories of Reconstruction focus on politics, political leaders, elites, institutions such as Freedmen’s Bureau, or political economy. What’s missing is the ground-narrative of Black people as they navigated freedom and American democracy. This book fills a huge hole 2/N

It’s important to understand that the transphobic tropes we see today have linguistic roots in racist “Black Males are Rapists” tropes of the past. It is a weaponization of racialized gender with the goal of terrorizing and eliminating an out-group. Nothing new under the sun.

https://twitter.com/mattxiv/status/1615733971207290883

It’s built upon an assumed and reiterated sexualization (of trans women and/or Black men), whereby their very existence poses a threat to the physical safety of in-group women. The only solution is a strict separation (annihilation). It’s fundamentally dehumanizing.

At #ASSA2023, excited to see @DrJPCunningham present our work (joint with @jhacova @RobynnCox @BjuggrenCarl @TrevonDLogan) on the relationship between historical lynchings and police killings today. Our goal: explaining persistent spatial differences, which are pronounced. We use historical lynchings because they capture not only racial animus, but also institutional features (law enforcement, political institutions) that can lead to racial disparities in police violence today (lynchings and police killings not prosecuted).

There is a lot of handwringing about Black male voting patterns and it’s potential to “flip” the coming election. This is a red herring. There is no polling to suggest that Black men will be anything but the second most D leaning demographic group, they have been for years 1/N 🧵 The 2018 midterms did see White women vote D by a small margin relative to 2016, but this reversed itself in 2020 with a stronger R lean than in 2016. For Black men, the D lean was stronger in the 2018 midterms than in the 2020 election. Best prediction: more of the same. 2/N

There should be some polling to back up a statement like this. I cannot find any recent polls by race and gender in the GA gov election. So, let’s do a little basic election math to determine the following: is 60% Black male support for Abrams a plausible number? 1/N

https://twitter.com/ProfessorCrunk/status/1577639112898748418

First, some building blocks. Black women voters in GA outnumber Black men voters by a 60/40 ratio. In the 2020 election, 18% of the total vote was Black women, and 12% of the total voters were Black men. That ratio is unlikely to change in 2022 in GA. 2/N

Whenever I hear “they should have gone to trade school” I know you know nothing about predatory schools that saddled students with excessive debt under the pretense of learning marketable trades in a short period of time.

They did what you said to do! It’s infuriating. These schools had very high default rates because students had high debt levels and low wages after graduation, assuming they graduated at all. Programs in veterinary technology, physical therapy, culinary arts, medical transcription etc. could leave you $30K in debt. Easily.

BREAKING NEWS!! Today @OhioState announced another 10 tenure-track faculty positions for the Race, Inclusion and Social Equity (RAISE) initiative. With the 15 positions approved earlier this year, we have identified half of the 50 research positions for RAISE!

https://twitter.com/OhioStateNews/status/1519378858717466625

It has been one of the highlights of my career at Ohio State to assist our Provost in selecting from an extremely strong set of proposals designed to enhance Ohio State's research capacity on race and social equity issues. This goes to the heart of our land grant mission.

As pertinent in 2022 as it was when it debuted in 1992. This poem by Essex Hemphill.

For My Own Protection

I want to start
an organization
to save my life.
If whales, snails,
dogs, cats,
Chrysler, and Nixon
can be saved,
the lives of Black men
are priceless
and can be saved. We should be able
to save each other.
I don't want to wait
for the Heritage Foundation
to release a study
stating Black men
are almost extinct.
I don't want to be
the living dead
pacified with drugs
and sex.

"Black households in the US with income > $75,000 lie in higher poverty neighborhoods than White households that earn less than $40,000" and @PatBayerNC shows that Black households need $65,000 in income to move to median neighborhood while Whites need only need $20,000. Strong evidence of the effects of segregation on economic opportunity. The most affluent Black households in Chicago just barely enter affluent neighborhoods, while White households who are poor have exceptional access to affluent neighborhoods.

When they said only disabled and aged people were “truly at risk of death” and we had big racial disparities in death early in the pandemic, we were screwed.
The “vaccinate our way out” policy ignored sociology, economics, and politics. There’s no other plan, and this is failing

https://twitter.com/newshour/status/1473082652181807106

It’s like they thought the end of “Contagion” was going to happen. That’s not how it works. When the virus was limited to the “vulnerable,” the immediate reaction by many was to dismiss it. Remember the Texas LG saying we’d have to sacrifice the elderly for the economy?

What an absolutely horrible take from @herandrews. Neglecting that historians, economists, sociologists, and other scholars have independently confirmed the central tenants of DuBois’ “Black Reconstruction” for the last 50 years is what white supremacist sympathizers do…

https://twitter.com/herandrews/status/1469703996466245638

For example, when @herandrews writes “It is noteworthy that this line started being touted only after the last people with firsthand memories of Reconstruction had died.” She is purposely overlooking the autobiographies of Black leaders during Reconstruction, such as Lynch (1913)

Spoiler alert: Nobody is taking to the streets. Nobody is going to do anything about an illegitimate SCOTUS. America has shown time and again that it acquiesces to conservative principles. As we stare authoritarianism in the face, folks will shrug their shoulders and move on. The American myth is one of individual bad actors and a noble population. The reality is one of individual bad actors enabled by people who don’t care. You don’t get segregation, Lynching, gender exclusion, and sexual violence epidemics without people deciding they will go along.

Note that the two white students demanded to be rewarded for taking *less* demanding courses. If this were reversed I seriously doubt the Black students would have been awarded honors. The low standards of white mediocrity strike Black excellence again! nytimes.com/2021/06/11/us/… I have the research of @JessicaCalarco in mind in reading this. Both of the white students came from well-connected families, and her work shied that these families get schools to align policies to their desired outcomes, which favor their children. This is one example.

New @ScienceAdvances paper on micro-level segregation by @RyanDEnos @jamesfeigenbaum and @shom_mazumder, and Jacob Brown looks at the influence of Black next door neighbors in 1940 on political attitudes 70 years later. advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/24/e… They use a measure which builds on my work with @jmparman on segregation using next door neighbors. This paper links it to voting information. In this project they find that white exposure to Black neighbors in 1940 increases the likelihood of being a Democrat decades later.