Decatur, Georgia, gateway and the entrance to the gentrified Oakhurst neighborhood.

Last week a professional historian who lives in a community that I have been researching and writing about since 2011 published some inflammatory, malicious, and demonstrably false tweets. The historian has a substantial social media following: almost 13,000 Twitter followers. Many of them are my colleagues and peers: university faculty, public historians, museum curators, and journalists. These folks unwittingly were pulled into a social media tar pit that has been well documented. Perhaps the best explanation for what I am writing about here may be found in this October 2015 History News Network article.

I no longer use social media to litigate my issues with Decatur and its fragile white residents. This post is intended to mitigate some short-term harm: readers of the historian’s tweets can take to their preferred search engines and use multiple permutations of words that the historian tweeted to discover my identity. Though the historian didn’t name me in her tweets, she effectively provided her readers with an easily navigated route to my identity.

The Decatur historian’s actions last week were understandable considering the gentrified community in which she lives. Her response echoed those of her neighbors years earlier: attorneys, engineers, and journalists who couldn’t reconcile what I was writing about their community with the carefully constructed image of Decatur being a liberal, progressive, and diverse community. Their exploits were outlined in the 2015 History News Network article and they will be more fully analyzed in my book on gentrification, erasure, and race in Decatur. Contrary to what the Decatur historian tweeted last week, there has been only one official legal action stemming from Decatur’s fragile white residents’ defensive and abusive actions to preserve their community’s brand and their own self-images as liberal, progressive, and diverse: I was the plaintiff.

DeKalb County, Georgia, temporary protective order issued on my behalf against an individual that the court found sufficient evidence for the order under Georgia law.

My last word on the matter for now is a recommendation for folks landing here to read Robin DiAngelo’s insightful 2018 book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. If visitors here don’t have time for the book, DiAngelo wrote a concise distillation of the book for The Guardian. If you’re on the run, no problem: NPR has a wonderful interview with DiAngelo that was broadcast in August 2018.

Meanwhile, for about 24 hours last week, thousands of people read the Decatur historian’s tweets; more than a hundred “liked” them and offered replies — definitive, blunt, and threatening — given without understanding the context for the tweets and without interrogating the tweeting author’s motives or the factual basis for them. Those replies included calls for me to be arrested, expelled from professional organizations, blackballed from academic conferences, and fired from my job. Several opined that I had a history of harassing and stalking women students. One implied that I should be assaulted.

This is a distraction from other important work. But, there is something from this distraction that I believe has educational value, especially with regard to how academics use social media. For that reason, I want to share some of the responses to the Decatur historian’s tweets. They will be cited in my future work on Decatur and on the complex issues around race, white privilege, and white fragility.

“If this person is acting this way with colleagues, imagine how he might be treating undergraduate women.” — Sara Norton, public history instructor.

“You need to have all of this on record, so talking to people about it is good. In addition, maybe get “Ring” as your new “doorbell” because it is a camera and can let you see who is there even if you’re not home. Please stay safe!” — Kristen Hillaire Glasgow, PhD candidate in history, UCLA.

“Gross gross gross!!!! I’m so sorry that happened to you. My cousin is an atty in the ATL if you need a firm recommendation” — Maggie Yancey, Independent Alcohol Scholar.

“I’m sorry you’re having to deal with a sentient piece of shit masquerading as a human.” — Dr. Rob Thompson, Historian, Documentary Team, Army University Press, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

“Sorry this is happening to you. He deserves to be professionally blackballed for this kind of behavior.” — Evan Bennett, historian of the American South.

“Definitely talk to a lawyer and local police. A restraining order might inflame him—but it’s something to think about. Also get a home security system with a panic button if you don’t already have one.” — Rebecca Anne Goetz, Associate Prof. of History, NYU.

“Don’t take chances, don’t assume your’re over reacting. Talk to police you trust will take you seriously. Talk to others for advice who have had this experience. Be safe. @ProfMSinha” — Daniel Louis Duncan, Live for 19thc history, writer and musician.

“I am so sorry this nutjob is coming after you. Definitely time to bring in the police.” — Dr. Megan Kate Nelson, Writer. Historian. Working on a book about the Civil War in the Southwest.

“[REDACTED] of course you don’t deserve this. But get him in his place: don’t stop writing, advocating, and everything else you do.” — Debbie Gershenowitz, senior acquisitions editor, Cambridge University Press.

“Holy shit [REDACTED]. I’m so sorry this is happening to you. I’m glad you’re getting the police involved, and coordinating action with his other victims.” — Amy Haines, Lecturer University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

“Dear God! I know I’ve said it before … but, some people just scare the hell out of me! This guy sounds like a sick creep!!!” — Jesse Horne, broadcast journalist, Wisconsin.

“Fuuuuuuuck. That man needs a restraining order. [REDACTED] do you need to move?” — Sarah Neill, master’s student in art history.

“holy shit. What an asshole. What are the police doing about this? If there’s more than one person being stalked, shouldn’t that merit an investigation??” — Victoria Woeste, Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago.

“That is craziness–you mean a job interview? Whoa. This is wayyyyy beyond the pale. Yep, I agree with others, time to get serious and report.” — Dr. Anne Whisnant, public historian.

“I would go to police. This is criminal behavior (literally)” — Susan D. Amussen, Professor of History in the Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced.

“This is awful. I would forward all of this info to his employer, as well as any pertinent law enforcement agencies.” — David Cordell, 8th grade social studies teacher.

“This is dreadful. Definitely go to police and consult professional organization. No one should have to put up with this nonsense.” — Kathryn Tomasek, Professor of Digital Humanities and Digital History at Wheaton College in Massachusetts.

“This should hold true as well for any university or college he’s affiliated with. Chances are that somebody like this has already harassed students.” — Zeb Larson, PhD student at Ohio State University.

“Report his sorry ass to whatever professional associations he belongs to.” — @Ole_Bonesy.

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In my latest article for The Activist History Review, I examine the proposal to remove a Confederate Monument in Decatur, Georgia. I wrote,

I’m happy that Decatur’s white supremacists will be deprived of a symbol to which they have deep attachment. but it’s a hollow victory when viewed in context. Left in place is a timeless system of structural racism and many more, less obvious monuments to white supremacy in Decatur. When those fall, too, then historians and anti-racists will have achieved something truly worth celebrating.

I began in 2012  trying to call attention to the structural racism that permeates every corner of Decatur society. The gentrifiers and Old South white supremacists living there ensured that any counter-narrative to the city’s brand as a diverse and liberal community would be violently ignored and marginalized. Meanwhile, six years later though my early observations have been vindicated.

Single-family home teardown, Oakhurst neighborhood, July 2012.

Decatur has become a white spatial imaginary where black bodies and black history have been erased. In their place are McMansions and historiography that celebrates a fictional past where the black experience exists only in the stigma of public housing projects and what white gentrifiers call “thugs”: the young African American men who strike fear into white mommybloggers’ hearts. Black history, like black wealth, black dreams, and black homes, was stolen while good white folks looked on, too self-absorbed, too prejudiced, or simply too stupid to see what was happening all around them.

Late last year I was contacted by a Decatur High School student reporting on what appeared to her to be racial bias in disciplinary actions at her school and the precipitous drop in racial diversity at the school. The student located me after reading some of my work on gentrification and racism in her community.

“I’m a senior at Decatur High School, and I write for our school magazine, Carpe Diem,” wrote Ellie Ritter in a November 2016 email. “I’m writing an article on Decatur’s gentrification and the displacement it’s caused.”

We arranged a telephone interview and I subsequently agreed to let her publish some images from my website.

Ellie’s reporting package examining gentrification and race in her hometown was published in the December 2016 issue of Carpe Diem, Decatur High School’s award-winning magazine. Kudos to Ellie for digging deeper into these topics than the professional journalists working in Atlanta and Decatur.

© 2017 D.S. Rotenstein