James Thomas asked David McDowell, the creator of the Twitter account @BeingOxford, if his politics would be too radical before curating it for a week, but McDowell assured him it would not be a problem.
With that in mind, Thomas, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology, started a conversation that reached more than 3,000 people.
“White supremacy is the most enduring threat to national security in U.S. history,” Thomas tweeted his first day as @BeingOxford.
From that statement, Thomas began a contentious conversation surrounding race-relations in and about the University of Mississippi campus and city of Oxford.
With over 3,000 people following the@BeingOxford account, Thomas said his week-long stint as guest curator was a good opportunity to put things that are unfamiliar and maybe even uncomfortable for the community into the Twitter-verse.
“You can gauge to see to what degree are people ready to have these conversations,” Thomas said.
As soon as he made the first tweet, Thomas said he decided to spend the rest of the week unpacking and adding more nuance to the subjects. Bound by the 140 character limit, Thomas streamed anecdotes and data from studies concerning local and national race relations ranging from the perceptions of the Mexican border to who planted trees in Lafayette Park.
“For certain individuals, they hear ‘white supremacy’ and they hear ‘I’m white, they must be talking about me,” Thomas said.
Contrary to this belief, Thomas said white supremacy is a set of processes and racial order that is both historically and currently institutionalized. Thomas said people tend to associate white supremacy with very explicit and almost antiquated practices of racism.
“For some people, they approach that as an opportunity,” Thomas said. “For other people, they approach that as a barrier or an obstacle to continue to do things that is normal for them.”
Part of what a sociologist does is to challenge and dismantle conventional wisdom, Thomas said.
“This is a great opportunity for me to say, ‘Hey, I know that you think that this is just a fact or historical truth, but here is actually the evidence that it is not,’” Thomas said. “To be able to make those connections, I think it gives us a proper context. Then we can maybe have that higher level of conversation.”
Buka Okoye, president of the NAACP chapter at the University of Mississippi, said he is happy Thomas is running the Twitter account because of the impactful and intentional language he uses.
“He’s really looking at the skeletons in the closet,” Okoye said.
“This voice is an important voice that’s here in our community, that should be heard in the first place.”
Thomas said it’s hard to know what to make of the responses he has received from Twitter. He said some people are willing to go as far as to acknowledge white supremacy exists, but still have a deep investment in their own privileges.
Thomas said though he is hesitant to say any great strides are being made, using the Twitter platform has certainly been an opportunity to increase discourse on things that are already happening on campus.
“Here is an opportunity where I can still be in my role as an educator,” Thomas said. “If there is a reason why I am tweeting about white supremacy, it is because I study it and I want people to be able to talk about it in an educated and informed way — versus a reactionary way, or not talk about it at all.”
Jennifer Stollman, academic director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, said Twitter is an effective platform for these types of conversations because the platform requires a concise distillation of information that can be digested easily.
Stollman said she thinks people have gaps in their knowledge of racial history and like to assume, since the University is making strides of progression, that they do not have to confront or reconcile its history with inequality or racism.
“It is the responsibility of community and campus stakeholders to pick up the hammer that Professor Thomas has swung and hit so beautifully,” Stollman said. “It’s up to the rest of us to make sure that conversation continues.”
