iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

While I agree that anti-intellectualism is a huge problem, I think we need to pay as much attention to pseudo-intellectualism.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

An important shift in in the national discourse that I think gets overlooked is the shift within black millennial culture from talking about racism as a personal moral failing to talking about institutional racism and that shift starts with hurricane Katrina and ends with Obama.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

There is a difference between a diverse school and an integrated school. That difference is the quality of the diversity. The question people should ask: Is the student body actually in community with each other or a bunch segregated racial and ethic groups occupying the same campus?

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Anyone who tells you that there is a single reason that a school does a good job or a poor job in educating students is lying to you. Creating the conditions for learning is a complex relationship between home community and school. But nobody wants to acknowledge that.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

It has been wild watching some folks who spent the last decade demanding that people use their privilege to help marginalized communities attack Nikole Hannah-Jones for trying to use her privilege to help a marginalized community.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Mills' idea of viewing white supremacy as a consequential ideology in human history is straight up one of the cornerstones of my book on bigotry.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Why is K-12 like this? Because of two SCOUTS cases that said 1) There is no constitutional right to an equally funded education & 2) segregation by law is unconstitutional but segregation by custom is constitutional. Combine that with how access to curriculum is treated as a commodity and gate kept.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

When a political movement won't condemn the bigotry done in its name, it is fair to assume that the movement simply doesn't consider bigotry to be a deal breaker. The justification does not matter.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

My simple demand for anyone who demands that a marginalized community accepts having their political rights sacrificed for "the greater good" is that they tell me which civil right that they currently possess are they willing to sacrifice to pick up two two points in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Considering that all Taylor Sheridan shows are diverse to the point where racist chuds got mad at 1883 and 1923 for having indigenous story lines and the sheer outpouring of grief across America for the death of Dolly Parton, it's obvious this writer has never been to an SEC game tailgate.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

It is fair to assume that people who will not condemn bigotry refuse to do so because, regardless of professed politics, they simply agree in whole or in part.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

My question for the "we have to compromise on civil rights to win" advocates is: "which civil right that you currently have are you willing to sacrifice pick up 2 extra points in Kenosha?" People forget, or ignore, that civil rights are a chain that is only as strong as its weakest link.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Civil rights is a chain that is only as strong as it's weakest link. The SECOND you accept the premise that some communities do not have full civil rights, then you have accepted the bigoted worldview and you have no grounds to stand on when they come to erase your civil rights.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

History tells us that folks who roll over on civil rights for one group will inevitably do it to another group. Turns out, throwing communities under the proverbial bus becomes habit forming.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

In the history of politics and society, compromising with bigots has never stopped them from making more deranged demands because they interpret compromise with their nonsense as a sign that those who compromise lack conviction in their own values.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

The antebellum South's obsession with civility and refinement was how the enslavers coped with the reality of their depravity and they HATED when anyone bluntly pointed out their depravity.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I get why people who are concerned with fascism in America constantly look at Nazi Germany as a model, but those people need to look at how Jim Crow governments functioned, the political rhetoric they deployed, and how they used state power to terrorize millions of people for generations.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I'm always a bit surprised that the demand for reparations for Jim Crow is not louder in America. None of the arguments against reparations for slavery apply to Jim Crow.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

As a Black Southerner, these deaths absolutely are activating historical memory.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

My read on the John Stewart's back story on Laterns- The way he was raised with an extreme version of "You have to be twice as good to get half as far" mindset as that is an old meme in Black American culture that developed during segregation. We call the meme"Black excellence" today.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

One of the memory holed facts In American political life is what Bouie pointed out about how at peak Woke the Democrats controlled Congress in 2020. I think people bury this fact because they don't want to talk about WHO eroded the political influence of the woke movement and fears a resurgence.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Race realism? Y'all mean bigotry cosplaying as science.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Something that is overlooked: the impact of Obama on white supremacists. His presidency was such an intellectual crisis for them because he disproved their beliefs in a way they could not dismiss & they have been crashing out publicly ever since. Embracing scientific racism part of the crash out

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Perhaps a cultural hot take- When it comes to liberation, respectability politics has a 0% success rate. It has never liberated a single oppressed or marginalized group. All it does is turn a bunch of people into Sergeant Waters from A Soldier's Story.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

As long as people keep it 100 about what worked and what failed, the discourse on what folks are calling woke 1.0 is a necessary one.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

There is a southern form of anti-bigotry that Dolly Parton really embodied. It's not heavy on theory and it's not particularly political in it's rhetoric. It's simply very concerned with harm and the moral obligation to do what is right. I don't think it gets talked about enough.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Watching people advocate for their own inferiority to appease the bigots who hate them will always be horrifying to me.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Bigotry is not and can never be a form of intellectual diversity because it is anti-intellectual.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Once they realize that silence will not work, the people who created a moral panic that has a body count will Try to cosplay reasons for creating the moral panic as philosophy and as concern.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Once the moral panic gets a body count, the institutions that gassed it up fall silent because they don't want to own what they have promoted.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Real talk - The fate of anyone who argues for their own inferiority is betrayal by the bigots currently clapping. It is inevitable.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I think there is a conversation worth having about the rhetoric that woke 1.0 utilized towards allies and how it framed bigotry as a social phenomena. As people ask in Louisiana: How did you sound?

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Something that folks have forgotten about woke 1.0 is how LOUD & PUBLIC the clashes between pragmatic advocates & more radical activists within social justice movements were. Folks should revisit the debates over "defund the police", "privilege", &"allies" to remind themselves how it actually was.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Oh yeah. I save the cut sentences and paragraphs as launching points for new essays and articles. I do the same with essays that don't get picked up by publications. This is definitely one of those writing practices that's just a net positive.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

My hot take is that many Americans do not understand bigotry, so they don't respond to it with their whole chest. Rather than the sole product of ignorance, I believe that bigotry is a moral and political commitment to a society split into those deemed superior and those deemed inferior.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Real talk- The psychological wage that bigotry pays out to bigots of every variety is domination. People would be absolutely horrified if they realized the sheer amount of harm that bigots are willing to inflict on themselves in order to harm the people they hate.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Gonna put this on my office wall to help ground my writing.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is a metaphor for the imperial boomerang, y'all.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

My theory of COVID trauma is that society having to go from zero to creating a personal hygiene curriculum of survival, the isolation of the quarantine, & watching it all become another culture war issue impacted the culture to the point where opposing science is now a common vice signal.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Something that is missing from 21st century conversations about bigotry is the sheer amount of people who make money by being merchants of discord on the internet. Supplying bigots with talking points and phony outrage that feeds their bigotry itch is big business for a lot of media companies.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

One of the particular Black Culture Horrors that sits at the center of Get Out is very old fear of finding yourself in a white environment, regardless of professed politics, that rapidly turns hostile. The film speaks to a culturally specific manifestation of a universal fear- being hunted

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

@victorerikray.bsky.social @mjsdc.bsky.social Am I mistaken or does this essay from the justice department basically say that they are rhetorically changing disparate impact liability but not actually changing anything about how it works in practice? www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

washingtonpost.com

Opinion | Putting the Civil Rights Act back on track

The Trump administration’s fight against unlawful disparate-impact liability is good for business and the Constitution.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Assimilation debates are so weird in a Creole culture like the United States.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

The "but I'm one of the good ones" mentality is near insanity.

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Nicholas Mitchell @nicholasemitchell.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

What makes transphobia unique as a form of bigotry compared to others is that you cannot write and enforce a transphobic law that does not require destroying the same rights for cisgender folks and transphobes knowingly harm themselves and erode their own rights just to hurt trans folks.

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