Affirm Black Women Portrait Series: Elexus Jionde
“White people can’t ever let go of 9/11, a single day in our history, but want you to get over 300 years of racial oppression lol.” - Elexus Jionde
With this viral tweet on September 11, 2016 Elexus Jionde began a history packed thread “of other American atrocities we shouldn’t be forgetting anytime soon.”
Some of the history covered:
-the Dunning School, a group of historians who claimed that Reconstruction failed and that Black people were better off enslaved
-the KKK who terrorized and murdered many hundreds of Black citizens
-the use of Black stereotypes to sell products such as Aunt Jemima syrup which Quaker Oats finally acknowledged as racist in 2020
-Jim Crow laws
-the 1921 massacre of “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa Oklahoma
-forced sterilizations, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study
-housing discrimination
-the FBI’s illegal COINTELPRO program designed to target and harass the Black Panther Party and the Civil Rights Movement, as well as its murder of Fred Hampton
-the War on Drugs which lead to mass incarceration
Jionde ended the thread imploring, “It is CRUCIAL to examine history to understand attitudes and social norms. We must look back. And not at those fugly govt issued textbooks…never forget 9/11. For sure. But don’t forget the rest of this shit either. Please.”
View the complete Affirm Black Women portrait series here
“…I have dedicated my career to ensuring that the words engraved on the front of the Supreme Court building— ‘Equal Justice Under Law’—are a reality and not just an ideal.” — Ketanji Brown Jackson