iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

We are setting up for our open house tomorrow @ 4:30. You KNOW this will good. Student performances, raffles, sugar!!!

Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Africana Studies/Rites and Reason Theatre at Brown invites you to a coffee conversation about the development of AI technology Topics include: the development of AI and America’s racial caste system; digital blackface; technology and inequality; how might users respond?

poster with the scales of justice tilted and two of the speakers

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I had the most engaging conversation with Gene Demby host of @nprcodeswitch Switch today about our kids, our hopes for their education, and the complicated landscape we are navigating right now. riverside.com/shared/snaps...

riverside.com

Riverside recording snapshot

Create your own studio-quality content.

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Annie Abrams @annieabrams.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Have you seen about the NYC model where they guarantee tuition back if your kid doesn't graduate having made $1mil? It's popular to talk about an elite hoarding liberal education for its children, that's not what's happening here

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Graduate High School having made a million or college, and no, I have not! This is sort of a first, the global elite chasing experimental education!

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

But why are parents paying all that money for these schools.

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Marnie Kaplan @marniekaplan.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Yes! I understand much of the history and why things are the way they are. Small districts, no political will to consolidate. But what’s frustrating is our district could be a model of what is possible. But the implementation has been so messy, & the local politics so contentious & so…

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Head Start and Title 1 funds are under pressure, and Nikole’s essay shows the persistent impact of racial and economic segregation in NYC schools. Then in higher education, UT-Austin is making precarity visible for Black studies majors, departments and faculty. The ferocity is significant.

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I think there is a generational educational access tsunami brewing re: Black and poor people that is as significant as the assaults and dismantling of Black educational access following Reconstruction and/or Brown v. Board. During the same little bit of time, the Justice Dept closed deseg cases,

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Just when I decided the whole Nor’easter thing was an overhype here in PVD, the skies have opened and the wind is gusting.

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Sorry our wires just got crossed. I was co-signing what I were saying! I appreciated it.

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

That’s the thing to me about education policy, it is so rarely based on complicated understandings of the issue and history in terms of both past efforts and as context is often missing.

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

His leadership at least initially showed such promise.

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

We raised our now 34 year old child in Princeton and first pivoted to education coming to terms with education politics in that state. Many dissertations have been written about the Garden State. The fight against racial and economic integration in that state is epic.

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I think this is true, and also we mix up our personal experience with education with thinking that all other experiences are similar so things often seem pretty straightforward in our minds.

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Yes. I write about these educational complexities but the part I did not fully understand was the belief in individual effort as the fix, as opposed to a welcomed benefit. But the piece clarifies the thinking.

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I really am happy that worked out for you and your family.

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

You should listen. The school board was not the issue here. I’m actually not so aware of school boards regularly bringing positive systemic change now that I think about it.

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

This is worth the listen. It was taped before the recent article. The takeaway for me is that individual effort, no matter how sincere, well argued, furious in its assault, will rarely change the system before the system changes you and those you love. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

podcasts.apple.com

An Argument

Podcast Episode · This American Life · September 26 · 1h 2m

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Jen @cassiciacum.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

It’s terrible. It’s also not a great time for humanities PhD students. I’m really worried about ours at UT. Our entire grad school got reorged. It used to be standalone with a dean. Now it reports to a senior Vice provost, is effectively under the Provost’s authority.

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

www.linkedin.com/pulse/anothe... The woman who buys human hair is not the enemy of the woman who sold it. The two are connected by an industry that needs both of them and fully protects neither. One woman's body is in the marketplace so another can move through her own world with less friction.

linkedin.com

Another Woman’s Hair

After writing about Christina Jenkins, Naomi Sims as the Black women who helped invent the modern synthetic hair market, I found myself thinking synthetic hair was never only fake hair. At its best, i...

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

How did synthetic hair become such a central part of Black beauty culture? Who built the industry? If you were to start digging into this question, you would keep returning to two names: Christina Jenkins and Naomi Sims. www.linkedin.com/pulse/black-...

linkedin.com

The Black Women Who Invented the Synthetic Hair Industry

I have been writing about Black women and beauty for 30 yearsl. Over that time I have researched beauty shops, beauty schools, hair politics, respectability, integration, entrepreneurship, and the com...

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

The object changed. The underlying logic remained remarkably consistent. Fashion and adornment became evidence.

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

For generations, Black Americans have lived with the consequences of a society that treats appearance as a proxy for character. Sometimes the target was a zoot suit. Sometimes it was a hoodie. Sometimes it was dreadlocks, braids, cornrows, or natural hair. www.linkedin.com/pulse/fashio...

linkedin.com

When Fashion is the Crime

Last fall, I taught a course on the cultural history of cannabis legalization. As I researched the class, I found myself unexpectedly immersed in the history of fashion.

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Before discrimination appears in policy, it appears in habits. Before inequality is enforced by institutions, it is practiced through everyday rituals that teach people what feels normal and what does not. Hair has long been one of those rituals. www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-b...

linkedin.com

What Black Hair Reveals About Politics

Years ago, I taught a course called Negro to Black: The Aesthetics of Racial Integration. The title often confused students.

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

AI is not only learning how to depict Black women. It is learning what kind of Blackness appears legible, desirable, professional, youthful, feminine, marketable, and beautiful. That is algorithmic Blackness

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

For generations, Black women have had to fight human beauty standards that treated our hair, skin, noses, lips, bodies, age, and features as problems to solve. Now those standards are being encoded into machines.. www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-a...

linkedin.com

When AI Decides What Black Beauty Is

A few years ago, National Geographic ran a piece on the science of beauty that returned to an old and unsettling claim. The beautiful face, researchers argued, is often a symmetrical face.

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Black Americans emerged from slavery into a nation that quickly developed new ways to deny them full citizenship. It did not guarantee political participation. It did not guarantee access to jobs, schools, banks, housing, or capital.

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Every year around Juneteenth, I think about how Black communities survived in the years after emancipation. Freedom and survival are not the same thing. Emancipation ended slavery, but it did not provide safety. www.linkedin.com/pulse/beauty...

linkedin.com

Beauty, Juneteenth and the Black Women Who Built the Infrastructure of Survival

Every Juneteenth, some Americans celebrate freedom. This year, as stories about voting rights, democratic backsliding, attacks on higher education, and the erosion of civil rights protections fill the...

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The Washington Post @washingtonpost.com · 06/06/2026

Residents of Monterey Park, California, decisively approved the nation’s first permanent ban on data centers in Tuesday’s election, with more than 86 percent of voters supporting the prohibition, according to data.

washingtonpost.com

Voters back first-in-nation permanent data center ban in city near L.A.

The ban on computer warehouses in Monterey Park won overwhelming approval as the tech industry struggles against pushback across the country.

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Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

In 1933 Adolf Hitler shook down German industrialists for millions of Reichsmark to establish what he called the Adolf-Hitler-Spende der deutschen Wirtschaft—a slush fund he used to pay off Nazis whose violence got them into legal trouble. In 2026, Donald Trump is quietly doing the same thing.

nytimes.com

Obscure Group With Trump Ties Plans to Route Funds to His Allies for Legal Fights

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Women spend much of our lives receiving messages about aging. We are encouraged to fight it, conceal it, slow it down, and disguise its visible signs. Entire industries depend on our willingness to believe that aging is a problem requiring intervention.

linkedin.com

The Hardest Transition. Going Gray.

The hardest part of going gray was learning that other people saw me differently.That surprised me.

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Black hair has always functioned as a cultural text, encoding economic aspiration and spiritual practice, generational memory and political positioning. It moves through entertainment and into the market and back into the community, carrying meaning at every stop. www.linkedin.com/pulse/hair-c...

linkedin.com

Hair is a Cultural Text: Just Ask Jay-Z

This past weekend, Jay-Z walked out onto the Belmont Plateau stage at the Roots Picnic in Philadelphia and the internet lost its mind. Not just over the freestyle he dropped or the apparent shots at D...

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

Starved of cash, the U.N. has made historically large spending cuts and embarked on an efficiency drive. It has closed offices and eliminated a record 3,000 secretariat posts. It has powered down escalators and ignored loose cladding on its 75-year-old headquarters in NY. www.wsj.com/world/the-u-...

wsj.com

The U.N. Is Going Broke as the U.S. and China Withhold Billions

The Trump administration has failed to pay billions of dollars owed to the international body, while Beijing has been accused of gaming the budget.

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

🙏🏾thank you so much for this!

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

Hurston saw adornment as artistry. Modern America often interprets the same impulse as failed discipline. That distinction matters because the policing of Black style has never been merely aesthetic. It is also about regulating who gets to occupy public space comfortably and under what conditions.

linkedin.com

Zora Neale Hurston understood something about Black style that America still struggles to accept

In her 1934 essay “The Will to Adorn,” Zora Neale Hurston argued that adornment was not superficial decoration, but a deeply human impulse toward beauty, invention, display, and self-making. She descr...

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L'Histoire de Manon @manonatelier.blacksky.app · 29/05/2026

"The photographs from Osaka's dinner offered a glimpse of belonging. What they did not offer was a ranking system. The difference matters. One creates community. The other creates a world in which people are valued according to how closely they resemble an ideal."

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

🙏🏾 happy to chat at some point if that might ever be of use to you.

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

I would say it caught fire in the 1970s with the anti war, free speech, Black power, bring more women and poor people on campus era. That is going to be a great book, btw.

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Fonseca came to play against Djokovic today. Fifth set upcoming. He is 19. His legs and nerves seem to be steady!!

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Noliwe Rooks @nrooks.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Djokovic, Fonseca has turned into a great match.

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