On the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (8/29), I’m reminded of not only the destruction of my home/community, but also that the experience helped radicalize me. I was 17 at the time. These events below, personally & systemic, shook my perspective & shaped my worldview. In 1965, the Army Corps of Engineers built the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO), a canal to expedite oil shipping to the Gulf of Mexico. During Katrina, the MRGO channeled the storm’s surge and led to the engineering failures experienced by the region’s protection network.

Sending immigrants to Northern states under false pretenses is straight out of the segregationists’ playbook of the 1960s. In 1962, the White Citizens’ Council, a network of white supremacists, placed deceitful ads in Southern newspapers to recruit Black families to head to Hyannis, JFK’s vacation spot, with the promise of “good jobs” and “housing.”

Some of my students are shocked when they learn that The Star-Spangled Banner, the US national anthem, has racist origins, so here’s a quick history: The poem, “Defence of Fort M'Henry,” from which Star-Spangled Banner originates, was written by Francis Scott Key after witnessing Fort McHenry's bombardment in Baltimore by the British during the War of 1812 – a war declared by the U.S., in part, to snatch Canada.

On the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (8/29), I’m reminded of not only the destruction of my home and community, but also that the experience radicalized me. I was 17 at the time. These events below, personally and systemic, shook my worldview. In 1965, the Army Corps of Engineers built the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO), a canal to expedite oil shipping to the Gulf of Mexico. During Katrina, the MRGO channeled the storm’s surge and led to the engineering failures experienced by the region’s protection network.

White supremacists who commit these terrorist acts collectively believe in the "great replacement theory" (GRT) - a conspiracy that Jews & elites are replacing white ppl w non-Europeans. This myth is based on a distortion of statistics, pseudohistory, & white supremacism. /thread Declining birth rates for whites and immigration fears are driving GRT. Let's look at the demographic transition model. This model assists w understanding/predicting demographics by analyzing birth rates and death rates. The model has five stages.

I was taught that the Civil War was a conflict between North vs. South and that Southern whites were united in a cause - they were a monolith. This is far from true. Here are 20 examples of white resistance to the Confederacy. - thread 1. Over 100k White Southerners joined the Union Army, making up a large percentage of the Union Army.

Last night a few former students and I questioned a white supremacist “protecting” the Andrew Jackson statue. We asked him basic history questions to see what he knew. - thread He didn’t know AJ owned slaves, committed genocide, and had never heard of the “Trail of Tears.” He didn’t know some of the Native Americans pushed out settled in our state and influenced our culture. He only knew how AJ won the Battle of NO.

New Orleans is being scapegoated for not canceling Mardi Gras. There is a lot that frustrates me about that revisionist narrative. Here are ten reasons:

#nolatwitter #neworleanstwitter 1. 1/6: New Orleans held its first Mardi Gras parade - before the illness was identified as a new type of coronavirus & before the first officially recorded death.