The economic anxiety argument is the exact same rationalization for Trump winning that we saw in 2016. The exact same. I wrote about this then. It took too many too long to listen. Now here we are again when we absolutely should know better. It is part of the process of justifying the country to itself and the majority of white American voters who chose a man who said he would be a dictator on day 1, who has threatened to round millions in camps, who has targeted transgender people, who ran a racist and misogynistic campaign, who has threatened to jail his political opponents and shutter news orgs and has promoted violence against media and adversaries. This comes from a deep need to absolve and normalize and this, too is dangerous. America has the strongest economy in the world and that doesn’t mean people aren’t struggling, they are, but polling is already showing it’s perception of economy not actual economy that led people to vote for Trump. And yet, Black Americans, who are disproportionately working class, hold collectively close to zero wealth, who have the highest unemployment rates even in a good economy did NOT vote for the man that his own former generals called a fascist. What that tells you is that vote was about perceived loss of status. What elected Trump was demographic anxiety — his campaign ran explicitly on it, explicitly! — and so many people whose job it is to dispassionately deal with facts still do not want to deal with that.

We must not delude ourselves in this moment. Multiracial democracy in the United States is less than 60 years old. It has always been contested, often violently so. It has always been fragile. Since this nation's inception large swaths of white Americans -- including white women -- have claimed a belief in democracy while actually enforcing a white ethnocracy. In the face of shifting demographics where white Americans will lose their numeric majority, we see a growing embrace of autocracy to keep the "legitimate" rulers of this country in power. History teaches us that we are in a perilous moment. The first time America attempted multiracial democracy was during Reconstruction at the end of the Civil War. A white majority in order to unify after a contested election succumbed to those who wanted to violently reinstate a white ethnocracy in what became known as the period of Redemption. Black Americans were stripped of their newly obtained citizenship rights for nearly a century in the name of national unity.

Democracy Summit 2024 on Covering Oligarchy is underway. Watch on livestream here.

https://twitter.com/c4jdhowardu/status/1842921426862412200

Political scientist Jeffrey Winters opens Democracy Summit 2024 with a primer on oligarchy. He tells journalists that megadonor is an inaccurate term and not neutral because donors give without expecting something in return.

I really wish rich, out-of-touch folks who nothing about education would just stop. 1) Read the fine print. THIS IS A GOVT VOUCHER PROGRAM. Voucher programs have not been shown to improve results for poor Black children because most cannot get into high-quality private schools. 2) Read the fine print. All of the money is coming from taxpayers, ie. the government. Roc Nation is not funding this, it is just launching an educational campaign that maybe it is being paid to do. I'm researching. But certainly, it's involvement is to convince poor Black parents to leave the public schools. 3) What do you think that $300 million could do for improving those low-performing public schools? 4) It is a lie that these programs do not take from public-school funding. Fewer kids in the classroom means fewer dollars to the school. 5) This is a windfall to the city's private schools at the expense of the public ones that most kids attend. Stop playing with us. Not only do students who go to private schools on vouchers not perform better, 1 out of 5 leaves the private school and actually see improved academic results by returning to the public school. brookings.edu/articles/resea…

What we are witnessing, once again, is the alignment of white power against racial justice and redress. We now have a legal landscape that takes the very laws created to eliminate the anti-Black caste system and uses them destroy racial justice efforts. The Supreme Court has determined actual school segregation is fine, but efforts to remedy it are unconstitutional. The courts have determined the almost complete exclusion of Black women from venture capital is legal — Black women get just .34 percent of these funds — but efforts to address that disparity violate the 14th Amendment, written to ensure BLACK people equal protection.

Can you show me the data that shows that private school teachers are better qualified? See, here’s the thing, you all think your voucher will pay for the Daltons of the world. It won’t. And Dalton won’t take your kids anyway. Your kids will be at some low/budget private school that doesn’t have to adhere to any academic standards and the rich parents who were already sending their kids to the Daltons of the world will just get a big fat rebate they don’t need on the taxpayers dime. Y’all are delusional. Further, many of these voucher movements are not bubbling up from parents. When polled, public schools parents consistently rate their own schools high.

On this day, the 70th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, I reflect on the fact that 75 percent of Black children learn in segregated, unequal schools today. And that a decade after I told our profession that our failure to cover segregation meant we were failing to cover education, our reporting has shifted to covering ideological battles about how Black history is taught instead of the inequality that most Black children still experience. So, let me re-up on some of my past coverage. propublica.org/article/segreg… “Segregation Now” theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

I began working on this essay even before the affirmative action ruling came down. It is a warning. We are in the midst of a radical abandonment of the compact forged by the CRM that cynically coopts the ideal of colorblindness to attack racial justice.
nytimes.com/2024/03/13/mag…
"Over the last 50 years, we have experienced a slow-moving, near-complete unwinding of the idea that this country owes anything to Black Americans for 350 years of legalized slavery and racism."

What we’re seeing with the LA Times is the result of an ethos that sees newsroom diversity as about feeling or looking good, and not about ensuring the accuracy and trust needed to produce high-quality journalism in a multiracial democracy. The anti-DEI backlash is being loudly fomented by the right but is also quietly embraced by many so-called progressives. When we talk about eroding trust in news, seldom mentioned is the distrust that occurs in majority non-white communities covered by heavily white newsrooms.

I sleep well at night knowing that every white man who ever held an important job was most definitely, 100 percent, without question, the most qualified. I mean, they never get fired for incompetence, jailed for corruption, let go for poor performance. They’re never given jobs or opportunities because of who their daddy’s are, or who they know, or the school they went to, or well, because folks would rather have a white man at the top of their organization because it makes them feel better. It’s only POC we need worry about.

Are we going to talk to all the 1619 references in “Leave the World Behind”?? Super market in town is called Point Comfort, which is the landing spot of the first Africans sold into slavery in Virginia.

It’s not well known that when LDF attacked segregation in Brown v. Board of Ed it didn’t just argue that segregation made Black people feel inferior but also that it made white people feel a false sense of superiority and the truth of that is so clear in this Pres. Gay discussion The # of white people who attack every successful Black person as an unqualified diversity hire reveals a desperate need to believe that the only way any Black person — and I mean any — can be more successful than they are is because they didn’t deserve it. This is racial caste.

Imagine being Black and running in a political party where you believe you need to disgrace your ancestors to have a chance.

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1707215477422883215

Tim Scott, the Second Middle Passage ALONE broke up about 1/3 of Black marriages. But, yes, anti-poverty program are the problem. wams.nyhistory.org/building-a-new…

There's been much gaslighting & moderate justifying of the new Florida social studies standards, people stating the "clarifications" were designed to show Black resilience, or were just "facts." So, I thought I'd compare the African-American history standards to the Holocaust's. As you can imagine, they were quite illuminating. So, let's be clear: facts in cases such as this are rarely neutral. It's which facts are highlighted, how much emphasis they get, how are they framed, what is left out, what is diminished and what is uplifted.

What is more clear than ever is that American school children need also lessons on African history pre-Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Because the ignorance African architecture, technology and centers of learnings by educated adults is just breathtaking. Like, stunning. So-called educated adults really think nothing happened on the continent prior to Europeans. Never heard of Mali, the Songhai Empire, ancient Ethiopia, ancient Nigeria. Nubia. Kush. The history of the literal cradle of civilization is just a blank page for most of y'all.

You know who also learned valuable skills? Free people. And unlike the enslaved, those free people could keep the $ from those skills, they could buy property with those skills instead of be property, they could support their families instead of have their children sold from them They could pass along the financial benefit of those skills to their children in their wills instead of have their children bequeathed as gifts in other people's wills. We mustn't let ourselves be gaslit. We mustn'tlet them disrespect our ancestors by diminishing their suffering.

We can wring our hands about the affirmative action ruling and fight for a few slots at elite historically white schools, or we can resource schools that have always served Black students. My @C4JDHowardU has announced a visiting professorship @HowardU. cfjd.howard.edu/nikole-hannah-… When SCOTUS overturned decades of precedent in prohibiting the use of race as a factor for college admissions, it simply returned us to our societal level. Racial exclusion from this nation's institutions of higher learning has been the norm for the vast history of the U.S.

A course that helps students use math in a practical way to examine a complex issue impacting society? I didn't know about this addition to the 1619education.org curriculum but it's awesome! Now @DailyMail carefree attitude abt facts? Not so much. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1… Shall we?

First, @DailyMail called the #1619Project a "controversial activist organization." What? The 1619 Project is a work of journalism. There literally is no 1619 Project organization. There is the NYT that published it, and Pulitzer Center that makes curriculum.

It's astonishing sometimes how many people have no idea how many Black men fought in the Civil War -- close to 200k -- and the 200-300k more Black men and women who ran away from slavery & served as cooks, scouts, laborers & spies for the Union, helping secure the Union victory. Our history is so white-washed that folks have really convinced themselves that Black people were just sitting around in the war waiting for white people to decide to save them. Black people were begging to fight & were denied until the N started running short on white soldiers.

Something that's commonly -- intentionally and unintentionally-- misunderstood: Reparations are not just for slavery, they are for all of the economic, educational and political subjugation visited upon the descendants of slavery. Black as a race is a political/economic fiction. Everything that Black Americans suffer is not because they are Black, but bc this nation was determined to keep the descendants of slavery a permanently subjugated people, to keep them an economically/politically exploited people. Race was created to determine who was enslaveable

You're not in the least bit embarrassed in May of 2023 to be writing this? A thread.

https://twitter.com/emmaogreen/status/1658915018350501921

npr.org/2023/05/15/117…