Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Profile picture
Jun 23, 2018 17 tweets 4 min read Read on X
This is the most important book that I read cover to cover in 2017: Race and the Totalitarian Century by Vaughn Rasberry 1/n
He says in the intro: “Very little of the vast literature on totalitarianism has followed the road opened by Arendt, and before her, by WEB Du Bois — who viewed the 1st & 2nd World Wars as interimperialist rivalries fought in, and over, African territory — on the relation between
on the relation between modern racial terror and the onset of total war and totalitarianism. . . Theorists of totalitarianism scarcely include histories of unregulated violence against Black people in their ideological coordinates.” This book fixes that.
It’s almost 400 pages and took me a year and is one of the hardest books I’ve ever read and it was completely worth it.
Rasberry successfully helped me understand and learn to articulate that totalitarianism and racism come as a pair and that white supremacy is a total system that has totalitarian features. White America and Black America live under two different political systems.
On p.93 he says: “The multiple and conflicting representations of the totalitarian experience suggest the concept is as much a literary as a strictly political or ideological construct — even if, to some degree like liberal democracy, it was a political fiction from the start.”
We see a clear connection between why literature matters — as political propaganda to your imagination — so why it matters that our writers keep writing. It situates what Richard Wright and Toni Morrison did/have done with their novels, responding to American totalitarian racism.
Found this note also where you can see the book helped me draw a connection btw discussions I was having with Joseph Martin about his work on contingency theory in #histSTM, critical race theory, and intersectional analysis of Black women in physics, which turned into a paper.
Another note I made: “Totalitarianism = a literary threat of nightmare as well as waking terror” and “integration was perceived by totalitarian regimes as a threat, suggesting racism is a foundational element of totalitarian regimes —> US is totalitarian in its race politics”
In other words, to understand Trump and how Trump is operating, you need to reframe your understanding of American politics as having a totalitarian component embedded in their foundation. White supremacy isn’t a side show: it’s the basis for the whole show.
There’s actually a lot of nuance to Rasberry’s analysis, including a discussion of the difference between “totality” “totalitarianism” and “total war” — can’t really do it justice on twitter (read Chap. 2!) But he makes an important point about not getting distracted:
He argues that if you want to claim that a society is not completely totalitarian, the same arguments go for the question of whether a society is a liberal democracy. I think what comes out of the text, successfully, is that which one you’re in depends on whether you’re white. 😁
I also found that the book helped me rethink Robeson and DuBois. As w/ Shotwell’s Against Purity, Rasberry is less interested in adjudicating whether someone is right than understanding the forces at work, turning the gaze of anger away from imperfect Black ppl to white supremacy
Also, yes, my friends: we can’t just read tweets and news articles, can’t just live in reactive mode. We still need to read and think deeply. We must be agile but not lose our depth or our capacity to take the long view.
The other book I would encourage folks to read in tandem with Race and the Totalitarian Century is Christina Sharpe’s marvelous In the Wake, which has provided a timelike thread for my own work on Black women in physics and social epistemology.
Everything that happens here happens in the wake of slavery. Everything. From particle physics to internment camps, it all happens in the wake of a history that travels with us.
And I mean her book is so significant in my thinking that I have a copy on my phone, my iPad, my computer and next to my desk. I never go ANYWHERE without it. I also give it to friends, regularly.

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More from @IBJIYONGI

Oct 8, 2018
Students of color feeling marginalized in STEM are not always people in need of remedial programming and assuming they need remedial programming is really problematic/hella racist
Learn to talk about people of color like we're the same species as you
Now that I have a moment to expand on this: what I said to the room where this was said today is that white people are the majority of people on welfare. It’s important to know the difference between majority and disproportional. Minorities are disproportionately poor, yes.
Read 9 tweets
Oct 7, 2018
Tomorrow and Tuesday I’m attending the #astro2020 decadal early career researchers workshop and as part of the requirements to attend, I had to read about 200 pages of (publicly available) documentation relating to the last decadal. I learned some things!
1. Apparently the NASA budget doubled between 1988 and 1991
2. The National Research Council *is* part of the National Academies (which are charged by law to produce a decadal survey in the various earth and space sciences every 10 years)
Read 12 tweets
Oct 6, 2018
There is seriously a thread of white women in my mentions very committed to denying white women's complicity in white supremacy, in response to a tweet from a Black Lives Matter organizer who has, you know, thought about this for longer than 5 minutes
When I pointed out to one of them that she was a repeat offender, she said I had cyberbullied her when calling her out on something I saw her do last year by letting folks know that her response to me was condescending and privileged
When I pointed out she had shown up in my mentions today, she deleted her tweet and didn't apologize for acting like I was the aggressor. Now every time I think the thread has died, another white woman steps in to wake it up again. Almost all of them are scientists.
Read 4 tweets
Oct 5, 2018
PARTICLES FOR JUSTICE IS LIVE! I am proud to be a co-author on this statement from high energy physicists:

particlesforjustice.org
"We write here first to state, in the strongest possible terms, that the humanity of any person, regardless of ascribed identities such as race, ethnicity, gender identity, religion, disability, gender presentation, or sexual identity is not up for debate."
"Belittling the ability and legitimacy of scientists of color and white women scientists using such flimsy pretexts is disgraceful, and it reveals a deep contempt for more than half of humanity that clearly comes from some source other than scientific logic."
Read 19 tweets
Oct 3, 2018
Thing I felt grateful for today: as a child of divorce and an international activist family, I spent a lot of time on planes and sometimes in passport offices alone, and along the way, many adults took an interest and talked to me and this meant I never felt alone or scared
Props to the woman at the passport office who enjoyed my diatribe about Jane Austen and later mailed me an old BBC adaptation that I hadn’t seen. Btw turns out a 13 yo needs a parent present to renew a passport, much to my dad’s chagrine lol
And to the many business travelers who, rather than wondering what the hell I was doing in business class (where the flight attendants often put unaccompanied minors back then), played cards with me and talked to me about my dolls.
Read 5 tweets
Oct 3, 2018
This tweet 👇🏽 is flat out wrong. Speaking as someone who does gender studies in addition to particle physics — gender studies is actually a notoriously difficult field to get published in, harder than physics actually, and only a few journals are really taken seriously.
It was actually easier for me to get a peer-reviewed paper on gender studies published in an astronomy journal than to get one published in a gender studies journal. I’ve now been successful in both. Let the critics say the same. ;-)
One piece of advice I got from a senior woman in science, technology and society studies who does race & gender in technology history was that gender studies is a very hard field and I should be careful. Her husband is a string theorist, so I think she knows what she’s saying. 😉
Read 4 tweets

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