This country does not *have* to be this broken. But it will remain so as long as it continues to self soothe with white supremacist mythology instead of reckoning with truth.

Make better choices, America
This is a fundamentally violent and abusive nation
https://t.co/wbbsbfdMny
The commitment to the ahistoricism of of "this is not who we are" is not merely objectionable. It is actively dangerous.

You can't fix something that you refuse to acknowledge is broken.
https://t.co/0DBUp7c9x4
Frederick Douglass, in 1852:
"To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me...?”
https://t.co/wbbsbfdMny
So yes, @JoeBiden, this thread, from an American who hasn't gotten a wink of sleep tonight, is for you.
The health of a society can be measured by the condition of those who hold the least amount of power within it.
The thing that told me, more than any of her speeches, that @HillaryClinton understands this, is her experience working for the Children's Defense Fund and the lasting lessons she took from it.
Now, does that mean she is perfect, or that she hasn't made objectionable decisions?

No. Of course not.

But we never really did have a meaningful discussion of how someone with that sort of formative experience might lead, and how different it is from 1-45.
And yes, part of that is because of a snide undercurrent of sexism that pervades the political media in ways they don't even realize about themselves
I mean, honey, the top dog at CBS News/60 Minutes for decades, was conducting serial abuse—in the workplace!— that was rooted in misogyny https://t.co/PGrYOtPPWJ
To think that that part of Fager was somehow cleanly divided from his role as a newsman is absolutely ludicrous.

And he's simply an example. There was a whole list of Shitty Media Men, remember?

What are the outward ramifications when antipathy to women is simply normalized?
When it's baked into our day-to-day lives in ways we don't bother to examine and called normal?

That antipathy becomes institutionalized, and it shows up in who and what we take seriously, and what we do not.
And we know this country REALLY doesn't taken Black women or our lives seriously.

This is a place that gave a home to a Central Park monument to a man who tortured Black women he owned, without anesthesia, and called it gynecology
https://t.co/IvHhi0nb97
This is very much the country that stole so much from Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey, plus many more black women *whose names we don't even know*, and did so over and over and over.

And if there is any chance for it to be anything better, it needs to truly understand what that means.

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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x