Cory James Young's Avatar

Cory James Young

@coryjamesyoung

assistant professor of history at UIowa | personal account | northern slavery, legal history, Black America | i ♥️ WNY

3,046
Followers
957
Following
566
Posts
07.07.2023
Joined
Posts Following

Latest posts by Cory James Young @coryjamesyoung

When homeless people do stuff like this, mayors, governors, even presidents call for more cops. DAs get recalled. Newspapers run endless fearmongering articles about it.

When bourgeois people do it? Not so much. bsky.app/profile/bend...

10.03.2026 01:56 👍 23 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0

One of the things we’re experiencing right now that makes all this worse is narrative rupture. The stories most of us have told ourselves abt this country are (& have been) plainly wrong. In the absence of new stories that reflect actual reality, what we get is stasis.

09.03.2026 12:43 👍 193 🔁 53 💬 8 📌 15

Things look grim in the markets right now, but at least the U.S. economy wasn’t already being propped up by a massive speculative AI bubble that is highly sensitive to rising energy costs.

09.03.2026 04:28 👍 4387 🔁 1043 💬 46 📌 44

Trump multiple times just today has said the country is at war. War can only be declared by Congress, and Iran posed no imminent threat. What Trump is doing there is a textbook illegal war and impeachable offense — if we still had a Congress.

07.03.2026 22:03 👍 11790 🔁 3027 💬 358 📌 105
Video thumbnail

“Trans children are perfect.”

06.03.2026 18:41 👍 4163 🔁 1144 💬 139 📌 175
Preview
She’d Never Changed Her Gender Marker. Kansas Invalidated Her License Anyway. — Assigned A trans Kansas resident recently changed her name but not her gender marker on her license, fearing what Kansas may do if she did. The Kansas DMV still flagged her ID.

This story, from @natezuke.bsky.social, is absolutely wild. A trans woman who never changed her gender marker was issued a letter invalidating her license. At the DMV they cut up her license, which had an "M" marker.

www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...

03.03.2026 12:05 👍 3606 🔁 1640 💬 72 📌 267

How could anyone have predicted that a Secretary of Defense with Crusader tattoos who attends a Christian nationalist church would get us into a religious Holy War? It’s a shocking development.

03.03.2026 03:17 👍 388 🔁 82 💬 11 📌 3

Today marks the first day of Women's History Month; yesterday was the last day of Black History Month.

Every day is for women's history and Black history and Black women's history.

Because these are not histories that are separate from histories of war and economy.

01.03.2026 12:52 👍 123 🔁 41 💬 1 📌 0

My local theatre played the 4k restoration last year and it was wonderful.

01.03.2026 03:44 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

“Pre-emptive” as in acting before congress can vote on war powers, not “pre-emptive” as in acting before an imminent attack

28.02.2026 12:59 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Every single person who has in any way fomented or run cover for this illegal act of imperialist depravity has the blood of these children on their hands.

28.02.2026 13:02 👍 37 🔁 5 💬 1 📌 0

These are “low enrollment” majors but the classes are regularly at capacity. They changed the funding structure a few years ago here, switching the allocation from course enrollments to majors then blamed these departments for a structural, top-down change. This is entirely a political choice.

26.02.2026 02:50 👍 2849 🔁 921 💬 37 📌 45
Preview
Real Americans Choice Outstanding Academic TitleOn January 6, 2021, white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and other supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the U...

See, too, how these organizations have mustered constitutionalism in support of their violence. This is a deep and structural history.

26.02.2026 13:53 👍 7 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0

the "just asking questions" to "legitimate questions about fairness in sports" to "the state doesn't have to consider us as real people" pipeline working exactly as designed.

26.02.2026 12:31 👍 5927 🔁 2292 💬 2 📌 24

A neutral observation about becoming a parent is that I now go “shhhh sh sh sh sh” without realizing I’m doing it.

22.02.2026 20:12 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

I had hoped my invocation of the "3-3-3 Court" made it clear I was being sardonic, but alas!

20.02.2026 19:18 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Return of the 3-3-3 Court, baby. Perhaps we were wrong to criticize them all along.

20.02.2026 15:34 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

the glorious constitutional principle of "the president can't fuck with Supreme Court justices' investment portfolios" stands strong

20.02.2026 15:06 👍 2499 🔁 594 💬 22 📌 15
Post image

Yesterday, those who teach Intro to Sociology at Florida colleges (as opposed to universities) received a ready-made curriculum from the state and were ordered to teach it.

Yes, you read that correctly. The *state* is enforcing a curriculum on college profs, complete w/ the following restrictions:

19.02.2026 16:47 👍 2754 🔁 1567 💬 171 📌 404

In devastating news, TIL that the typographical symbol ^ is a "caret," from the Latin "there is lacking," and not a "carrot," from the fact that it resembles a tiny carrot.

19.02.2026 16:48 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

This reminds me of a bill that the Pennsylvania Legislature debated in 1822 that would have made it illegal for slavers to march people through the state *in chains*—the shackles were the object of concern more than the human trafficking.

19.02.2026 15:34 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

If your Marxist critique doesn’t recognize race as a structure of domination, then it’s worth fuck all to me.

18.02.2026 00:26 👍 569 🔁 94 💬 10 📌 8

For Presidents’ Day, I thought I’d put together a thread of *other* Presidents talking about George Washington and slavery. Away we go! 🧵/1

16.02.2026 15:10 👍 69 🔁 37 💬 1 📌 6

Looks like this bill won't move forward this year.
www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/p...

16.02.2026 23:22 👍 44 🔁 18 💬 2 📌 0
Preview
Philly suburbs seek to assist lawsuit over slavery exhibit removal “Our history is imperfect,” said Delco Council Chair Richard Womack, “but it is ours, and the federal government can’t rewrite it or ignore it the moment they find it inconvenient.”

When you've even got Bucks County and Delco joining an amicus brief to oppose your efforts to erase the history of slavery, you know you've fucked up. whyy.org/articles/phi...

13.02.2026 13:05 👍 136 🔁 43 💬 1 📌 0

Habeas corpus actions are the ancient common law writ used to create a legal action to sue for freedom. They were crucial in the early-nineteenth-century efforts to challenge slavery.
This graph showing “habeas cases” suddenly leaping in 2025 —
is terrifying.

dlas.uncg.edu/petitions/

10.02.2026 19:37 👍 218 🔁 90 💬 2 📌 1

Struggle is not the goal.

It’s the method.

To get free.

Too many people imagine struggle is the goal, so any acts of worldbuilding that prefigure freedom are dismissed as incidental, as distractions.

10.02.2026 00:51 👍 211 🔁 68 💬 0 📌 1

FAMU can't use the word Black on anything posted around campus related to Black History Month, to stay in compliance with Florida state laws against DEI. Black students can't use the word Black at their Historically Black College during Black History Month.

08.02.2026 14:28 👍 4074 🔁 1507 💬 147 📌 223

Billie Holiday avoids making political statement, sings Strange Fruit instead

09.02.2026 00:47 👍 676 🔁 130 💬 7 📌 3