periodic reminder that meritocracy is a lie, professional success = collective access determined by your social location. Didn’t get that fellowship? Did you know the person who created it? No? that’s why. everything is about networks or serendipity/proximity
i’m not saying people don’t work hard but access is not primarily a function of effort. it’s about networks of financial and social capital. there are infrastructures, some are visible, most are not. you can be included not included, this has nothing to do with merit
May 21, 2023 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
relatedly, this idea of genocide as teachable moment characterized a lot of the pushback i got from the funambulist article as if genocide in tigray is either somehow not wrong b/c of those who remain invested in abyssinian mythos or it’s wrong but “look they’ve learned nothing”
my position remains that one, genocide is just wrong, no qualifier, tf?
but two, what the tigrayans and any group who wishes for self-determination must contend with, is whether the pathway to protection from genocide and political autonomy is state formation?
May 19, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
We spend a lot of time “talking about Kevin,” or dissecting the cold, sociopathic affect of white supremacy because its school shooter ethos so profoundly shapes the development of technology
logicmag.io/supa-dupa-skie…
+the working conditions concealed by the sleek, minimalist design of our personal devices. We can rest assured that while using an iPhone, we’ll never have to confront the children in Congolese coltan mines or the Amazon distribution centers enclosing the “ongoingness of slavery”
May 19, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
the inability to speak substantively to this is not essentially an ethical dilemma but a conceptual one in which a continent of people are subsumed into this universal category “african”, any differentiation reduced to “ethnic tribalism”, in turn a vestige of western colonialism
this is why you see events akin to the american civil war where the stakes are racialized slave modes of production and the concerns of a regionally indexed capitalist class being described as “ethnic conflict”, “divisiveness” and “dangerous polarization”
May 19, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
there is nothing superior about text. reading and writing come easy to me but if they didn’t i would do something else. for those who hate it, instead of strategizing on how to power through, imo it’s much better to channel your energy on symbolic orders/modes you love
this is one of the reasons i’m so passionate about putting chess, visual art, craftsmanship and performance on the same axis as the essay or the book. i don’t want to read work by those who hate writing, I want to engage with them on their desired frequency
Mar 4, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
also those of us who been organizing against family policing haven’t emphasized enough how the genocidal separation of black and indigenous families was a method of disciplining queer kinship and disallowing trans life
“liberal shock” emerges from (mostly white) middle class parents of trans kids who are subject to the terror of family police for the first time. but end up in foster care agency’s visiting hours and you’ll see so many trans parents, trans kids
Nov 20, 2022 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
fascinating to compare and contrast Timnit Gebru’s analysis of “Effective Altruism” to Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò and Liam Bright’s. Who is marked as more of a leftist? Who is painted as hysterical vs who are the ever reasonable niggas?
speaking of who is able to recognize fascism or not. Adom Getachew was evangelized in both reconsidering reparations and elite capture and now i have to sit with the foolishness that is haymarket literati co-signing amhara nationalism cum IR as worldmaking. all of y’all bffr
Nov 20, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
so many enslaved as domestic workers in these petrostates are the children of farmers from deep in the ethiopian countryside. the empire relies on the exploitative labor arrangements of the southern breadbasket.
it was aba-jifar’s mercantile/trade arrangement with the omani and zanzibar empires that made the 150 year jimma monarchy possible. the part you’ll never hear if you take a tour of the palace or museum is what was being traded was humans, black bodies.
Nov 19, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
post-WW2 much of the american eugenics movement—celebrated in mein kampf—re-articulated themselves as population science and demography to deal with the legitimacy crisis posed by the fall of the third reich. This in turn deeply informed the development of computer science.
Eugenic ideas ie identifying the unfit are core to the development of technologies marketed as AI—see automated decision systems like Allegheny Family Screening Tool which marks families in poverty as pathological.
Nov 18, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
my academic career began on twitter. when my 5th kid entered preschool, i hit up all the authors of my favorite books to do events. i built a career off that. i established a track record off that. i fostered a network that was otherwise denied based off my circumstances.
when i emailed a marine biologist, a black studies professor, an agroecologist or a prison abolitionist that was #OnHere, what I posted served as guarantor to my personality, politics and ability to curate readings or resources…twitter served as a dif kind of credit check
Nov 18, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
if we friends enough that you in my DMs send me your number ☀️
i’m going to miss y’all 😩
Jul 5, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
The amount is not much (5000 euros) but it’s urgent that we stand in solidarity with Mohammed El-Kurd and against the Israeli Occupation of Palestine. It’s urgent that we do so LOUDLY in the context of german cultural institutions.
I understand that some of my fellow curators and organizers of the festival would prefer to stay silent about this, fearing that a public statement will prevent them from getting money from other colonial german institutions. and i…
Jul 5, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I’m deeply looking forward to the 2 events I curated at @Kampnagel this August on Family Policing, Indigenous Blackness in Tech. @lopalasi invited me to curate and has been extremely intentional about funding, so
when I saw that @goetheinstitut had disinvited Palestinian poet and organizer Mohammed El-Kurd from a conference in Germany under the extensively disproven allegations that he is antisemitic, I was grateful that @lopalasi instantly agreed to reject Goethe funding
increasingly skeptical of the term islamophobia or x group (phobia) more generally b/c it ascribes a level of clinical pathology where various supremacies and political analysis belongs.
also for islamophobia in particular, sometimes it feels like a framework that doesn’t allow for the specificity of muslim political formations or anti-muslim sentiment esp given intramural tensions btwn black, arab and asian muslims which play out in anti-muslim rhetoric
Jul 5, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
ngl this is hilarious, predpol, the CREATOR OF PREDPOL was unfairly victimized by “militant woke mobs”
the right just over here linking the criminalization of black people, zionist occupation and anthropology for the free
Jul 4, 2022 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
as a non-adoptee but someone who has been impacted and organizes around family policing, the v particular thing about the whiteness of adoptee twitter is that for black people adoption or foster care is not a singular event that effected them as an individual
as black theorist christina sharpe says, antiblackness is the weather and in this vein family separation, the commodification and sale of black life is the literal climate of black being in this country.
Jul 4, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I’d like people to understand that 1) this already has been happening for generations in poor black and indigenous communities incl queer families
2) adoption overwhelmingly is the sale of other peoples children from those same communities to white families queer or otherwise
the child abuse and sex offender registry has historically been a way to undermine the autonomy and mobility of black and indigenous groups. responding to contemporary attacks on trans families should be situated in this history.
Jul 3, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
the state or whatever actor may have some agenda in how they frame a massacre but ultimately hundreds of people being executed is wild and should be mourned full stop.
and like idk if the state needs to murder 200 people to manufacture consent for x. they seemed to be doing that prior.
