Read on Twitter
2008
What happened? Three simultaneous things:
1. The tea party, the fruition of decades of low-key local work by the cultural right wing, burst onto the national scene.
2. White people briefly felt a brush of the financial stress that Black people always live with.
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What happened? Three simultaneous things:
1. The tea party, the fruition of decades of low-key local work by the cultural right wing, burst onto the national scene.
2. White people briefly felt a brush of the financial stress that Black people always live with.
1/
3. The rise of social media as a political tool and driver of national discourse.
2/ https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/journalists-on-twitter-study.php
2/ https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/journalists-on-twitter-study.php
Young white people became politically energized by their economic anxiety and the misogyny Bros of journalism got their audience. They reset movement politics back to 1960s Yippies, erasing decades of work by BIPOC leftists.
3/ https://mobile.twitter.com/eminently_me5/status/1275881757531951104
3/ https://mobile.twitter.com/eminently_me5/status/1275881757531951104
Newly activist white people saw the tea party as a model - but were ignorant about the decades of work that went into building that power within the GOP
4/ https://mobile.twitter.com/eminently_me5/status/1339759503751991297
4/ https://mobile.twitter.com/eminently_me5/status/1339759503751991297
Being driven by white men, and modeling themselves after an aggressive mainly white men movement, they decided pure aggression was the means to their end, but
5/ https://mobile.twitter.com/eminently_me5/status/1340039888918491137
5/ https://mobile.twitter.com/eminently_me5/status/1340039888918491137
They began attacking everyone who didnât completely align with them, including the BIPOC leftists who had been doing groundwork for decades and whose interests were NOT featured in their movement, and the more politically astute who understand coalition building. 6/
Their candidate lost in 2016. They responded by doubling down on the aggression while their candidate worked on expanding his support by adding more policy that BIPOC activists call for to his platform. 7/
The candidate gained more support from BIPOC activists and leftists, particularly those at the age that became energized in 2008, but still lacked substantial support from Black voters, who are long-game players by necessity and depth of experience, and 8/
during 2019, the continued aggression and class reductionism by that candidateâs supporters and his actual campaign staff undermined his efforts, 9/
as did his own tendency to slip back into class reductionism when speaking extemporaneously, and his tendency to launch broad attacks against a party that many of the people whose votes he needed identified with. 10/
When their candidate lost again in 2020, instead of processing that their aggression helped him *lose*, many said the flaw of his campaign was that it was not aggressive *enough*.
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The broad and powerful rise of the Black Lives Matter movement has now changed the game somewhat. Black activism has regained its foothold but now thereâs some uneasy negotiation between two power centers of left activism: 12/
the class reductionist white hegemonists and the more progressive BIPOC activists.
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A lot of this negotiation is obscured as class reductionists put #BLM in their bio and claim it for their protests, though they limit their real concern for race-based inequities to direct justice system issues
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and as Black activists embrace many of the policies embraced by the class reductionists, though realizing as a package the latter neglect addressing core inequities of the US. 15/
One set focuses on the left image. The other on the center image (note POC should imply multiple marginalizations outside of color).
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h/t @ReverseMarxism
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h/t @ReverseMarxism
So we have an already bifurcated left activism that is, by and large, using a model for power leverage without understanding the work that built the power of that model.
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Left activism has the benefit of tons of media coverage and a lot of political ears, but left activists are also harming their own goals by internal division about what those goals are and by a lack of understanding of how to gain power within the US political system. 18/
Instead of taking the opportunity to make real inroads, they keep responding by doubling down on their errors. 19/end https://mobile.twitter.com/eminently_me5/status/1340039196480835606
