A Hero Aint Nothing But a Sandwich - race and adoption

I'm working through my relationships with my father and my niece for a podcast, but because of how much we now rely on the interent as the arbiter of truth, and the way we scrub our social media to reinvent ourselves, I have to get some of this down.  

 One of the things I learned on my sabbatical, is what doomscrolling is and what it does to my mental health.  I engaged with social media anew in 2016-17.   I'd given up on Facebook, and the news aggregators I'd come to rely on all went away, so I became active on Twitter.  I searched out diverse voices  from across the political spectrum.  I didn't realize that the algorithms favor conflict, and my feed kept filling up with the worst voices; probably because I tried to correct or inform the most counter-factual or crazy assertions.   Once I figured this out, I started purging my social media feeds. 

One prominent voice was Nikole Hannah-Jones @nhannahjones who goes by Ida Bae Wells on Twitter.  She is brilliant and says things that need to be said, but her position on adoption indicates that she values social goals over orphans.  Hannah-Jones says that life in an institution for black and biracial children favorable over a loving home and family.   My dad and my niece, or more accurately what they mean to me, keep me from following her on Twitter after that.  It felt like too much hate to me, but I know I can not be objective on this. Both of these people in my family are, or were, racially complicated (and my niece is black). 

I dropped her on January 19th 2020 based on racial comments and opinions she posted about the issue of white parents of black children via adoption.   I remember a conversation back and forth with her that day on Twitter (this was before her 2020 Pulitzer Prize for journalism).  She pointed to me to publications she's written on white/ black adoption.  I don't think the article b-boy boooo-eebaissee shared was the one, but it might have been. Maybe she had in mind Angelina Jolie, Madonna and evangelicals

Her tweets have since been deleted.  You can still find it quoted on a lot of right wing blogs.  I found it here at https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1083407164356612100.html 

I believe in systemic racism.  I've seen it impact my niece, my wife, and my son.  I hate the idea that to be woke, or politically right/correct, you have to embrace without criticism any thought leader.  Just like a broken clock is right twice a day, even people with the worst motivations can be right sometimes, and the best people can be wrong.  It's ironic that "academic freedom" has moved from this idea to a defense of negative and hateful rhetoric - as discussed with Samira Hussein in my next podcast to publish - where we will discuss the Muslim experience and the challenges of diversity in higher education.

On the plus side - I still dig @jemelehill, @akilagreen, @AprilDRyan, @JuliaDavisNews, @Bakari_Sellers,  @BenjaminPDixon, @staceyabrams, @MarvinDunn4 and @HenryLouisGates.  If anyone has suggestions of credible black voices to follow on the Twitter, please share.