Ida Bae Wells Profile picture
Reporter @nytmag//Creator #1619Project//EP #1619Hulu//Co-founder @IBWellsSociety //Founder @c4jdhowardu //Knight Chair @howardu//
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Mar 13 7 tweets 2 min read
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…
Image "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."
Jan 24 4 tweets 1 min read
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.
Jan 24 5 tweets 1 min read
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.
Dec 20, 2023 9 tweets 2 min read
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.
Dec 13, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
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.
Sep 28, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
Imagine being Black and running in a political party where you believe you need to disgrace your ancestors to have a chance. 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…
Jul 31, 2023 26 tweets 9 min read
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.
Jul 24, 2023 5 tweets 1 min read
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.
Jul 22, 2023 6 tweets 1 min read
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.
Jul 11, 2023 7 tweets 3 min read
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.
Jun 7, 2023 10 tweets 4 min read
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.
May 31, 2023 7 tweets 2 min read
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.
May 30, 2023 5 tweets 1 min read
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
May 17, 2023 12 tweets 3 min read
You're not in the least bit embarrassed in May of 2023 to be writing this? A thread. npr.org/2023/05/15/117…
Apr 23, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
Interesting choice by @CBSSunday -- my favorite news show btw-- to do an entire segment in book bans that didn't feature one POC, that didn't mention the racial makeup of Moms of Liberty, and that erased the role the targeting of 1619 Project has played in all of this. There is just one book targeted by federal legislation, and one book that Florida has specifically prohibited being taught in all of its public schools.
Mar 31, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
I've been using all the conversations leading up to Trump's indictment, the hand-wringing, the deference, the political considerations, to teach my students about power. It is a near-tangible ex. of this thing we know exists but sometimes pretend we don't understand how it works. Regular Americans get none of this treatment. Everyday we lock people up with no consideration of their circumstances, no concerns about the larger ramifications for their lives or anyone else's.
Mar 30, 2023 13 tweets 2 min read
My daughter's school is offering SHSAT tutoring to help students on the specialized h.s. admission test. My daughter's friends all signed up then the other day she said they all changed their minds bc they looked at admit stats for Black kids & decided they wouldn't make it. Seeing how few Black students were successful enough to gain entry to these public schools, these smart, studious Black girls from an unscreened, regular Brooklyn middle school decided it was better not to try than to be set up for failure. A system operating as designed.
Mar 28, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
THEY DON'T SAY THIS ABOUT ANY OTHER TYPE OF CRIME. But when it comes to the ability to use weapons of war against civilians, they say nothing can and should be done, because people who want to shoot up schools are going to shoot up schools, so let the chips fall where they may. In a nation where gun death is now the #1 cause of death for American children, the day after a mass murder of school children in his city, a lawmaker says, "We're not going to fix it" because if someone wants to kill kids they will. We are truly an exceptional nation.
Mar 17, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
Anti-woke is just that: They hope we won't be paying attention as they literally work to erase this country's racist history. Until 1968, we were a nation where anti-Black racism, racial apartheid,discrimination were built into law/society.That's just fact nytimes.com/2023/03/16/us/… A "publisher created multiple versions of its social studies material, softening or eliminating references to race — even in the story of Rosa Parks — as it sought to gain approval in Florida." The law Rosa Parks challenged explicitly prohibited BLACK people from riding in front.
Mar 9, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
Re-re-re-reading Du Bois's Black Reconstruction." And, damn, this brilliant man was also such a gorgeous writer. Like, we know this, but still. Damn. Image "And then some unjust God leaned, laughing, over the ramparts of green heaven and dropped a black man in the midst." Just, whew.
Feb 24, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
Nope. Guess who doesn't have to imagine this? Black students. It's been the story of Black America for 350 years. And you know how I know she's talking about Black students specifically? She calls this fake scenario reparations.