The Top 5 Reasons ADOS is Trash
Who is #ADOS?
According to the hive of bots that pushes their message, or anti-message as the case may be, ADOS stands for American Descendants of Slaves. Founded by a former board member of a hate group, adored by Ann Coulter, comprised of white people playing blackface on the internet, and coming out of their cabins only when it’s time to tap dance for white nationalists — this group pretends it is the ultimate voice of the Black community and it speaks for all Black folks on all black topics.
Their main messages are:
1. Don’t vote
2. Tangibles! (also known as Reparations)
3. Africans aren’t black
Doesn’t make much sense, mostly because it’s some nonsense a cross-burner with Klan hat came up with, but that doesn’t stop them. They are loud. They are relentless. And they are out to attack black leaders and celebrities with all of their Kanye level free thinking and Diamond and Silk-esque blackkk talkkk. So, in case you run into one of them out there on the digital highways, here’s what you should know.
1. One of the founders of ADOS was part of a white nativist hate group.
ADOS was founded by Yvette Carnell and Antonio Moore. Antonio is a lawyer, supposedly, and that is pretty much the beginning and end of his resume, if you don’t count getting paid to fuck over your own community. Yvette Carnell was on the Board of Directors of Progressives for Immigration Reform (PFIR). PFIR is populated and supported by the SPLC designated hate group the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
They are a white nativist hate group that is closely affiliated with both the KKK and the GOP. They believe not only that white people are the most important people in the country, but that a certain category of white people has a birthright claim to the United States of America. As if the only people with an actual birthright claim to this land weren’t the indigenous populations of North America. And as if black and brown folks weren’t somehow here longer than they were. But nonetheless, this elite group of white people are the only people that white nativists believe should have power, control, opportunity and access in the United States. And weaponizing their birthright claim to the benefits of elite American citizenship is how they tear down nonwhites and advance their own agendas.
In fact, one of the ways you can tell that #ADOS is a direct descendent of #FAIR is their insistence that their collective power be attached to a birthright claim. According to the ADOS website, “ADOS — which stands for American Descendants of Slavery — seeks to reclaim/restore the critical national character of the African American identity and experience, one grounded in our group’s unique lineage, and which is central to our continuing struggle for social and economic justice in the United States.”
For being an organization of and for black folks, they sure do sound like white folks.
2. They’re bigots
Individual #ADOS bots may claim that they aren’t bigots, but one of the cornerstones of the #ADOS movement is blatant anti-immigrant bigotry. Black nationalists and white nationalists alike both suffer from an unfounded need to indigenous territory that was stolen from and colonized by white people as their own. In lieu of an indigenous birthright to the land, they have both fabricated a narrative birthright that somehow magically entitles them to the full entirety of the United States. One is based on white bullshit (FAIR). The other is based on white bullshit wrapped in blackface (ADOS).
#ADOS delves into this by trying to split up black communities into individuals that are the descendants of slaves and those that have immigrated or those that are the descendants of those that have immigrated from Africa, the Caribbean, and other territories and nations that aren’t in the states. These divisions further carry over into anti-Latino immigrant sentiments that serve to deepen the black-brown divide. This divide plays well into the white nationalist agenda of divide and conquer. It doesn’t do much to advance the black agenda.
3. They Can’t Define Reparations.
The majority of #ADOS accounts on Twitter come from the same bot farm. They underwent the same bot farm training. They have the same stock bot farm responses. They never answer questions directly. And they almost always find a way to slip in the ADOS website.
One of ADOS’s most common talking points is their united and ridiculous call for “tangibles.” This is their attempt to relabel and coopt the movement for reparations. Rather than support the people and organizations that have actually made advances for reparations at the local, state, and federal levels, ADOS pretends that no one has ever done anything ever. No one is doing anything at all. And that the way to actually get reparations is to yell and tweet at white people until checks start magically coming to black folks in the mail.
And this odd fuckery is actually one of the keys to shutting them down.
Try it yourselves. Ask them to define reparations. They can’t. They will instantly refer to their list of deflections and insults, but they won’t define it. At best, they’ll give you a picture of a dictionary definition (that was written by a white person), but they won’t define reparations in terms of slavery. They won’t be able to distinguish between reparations for slavery and reparations for blackness. At best, they’ll give you a link to the ADOS website and freak the fuck out.
4. They have no plan
You can ask ADOS how they plan to achieve their goals until you’re blue in the face, but they won’t be able to answer you. The bots of ADOS have no plan. They only goals are to turn black folks against each other and to keep the black community from voting.
If you ask them why black folks shouldn’t vote, they’ll give you the same stock arguments from their Russian printout over and over again. The first is that they are tired of giving the Democrats their vote without anything in return. The second is that until there are tangibles, black folks should withhold the vote. And the third is that they are tired of saving the Democratic party. All of these are bullshit, but ADOS isn’t about truth. They are about consistency and bot mentality. But there are ways to counter.
First, ADOS never saved the Democratic party. They can’t even save Mississippi. The foundation of ADOS’s bullshit claims rests on the false idea that black voters have given the Democratic party nothing but victories in state after state. And that’s just not true. While it’s true that the black voting bloc has the potential to completely dominate the political landscape (you can read more about that here), that potential is far from actualized. In fact, while they have the potential to hold 270 of the 538 votes in the electoral college, they have only managed to secure a handful of those votes. So maybe, and that’s an incredibly weak maybe, the strategy to withhold the vote might be viable if enough of that vote had been mobilized to leverage, but that work hasn’t been done. Further, black voter turnout rates are so low in some localities, it could be argued that ADOS was successful in disenfranchising the black community. That effort did not translate into reparations for those communities. So ADOS can’t even save their own communities let alone the entirety of the Democratic Party.
ADOS’s argument that no candidate should receive the vote of ADOS because no candidate promotes reparations is also flat out bullshit. There are a number of candidates at the local, state and federal level that promote reparations in various forms. ADOS can’t name one of them, though, because their platform is to divide on the basis of bullshit, not unite on the basis of truth.
And their argument that the Democrats haven’t given the black community anything in return for their vote is also bullshit. That isn’t to say that the Democratic party has done a great job. And it isn’t even to say that they haven’t fucked up pretty significantly more than their share of times, too. But voting is a choice between two parties, in most cases. If you care about any of the issues that affect the black community, then the choice to block the Republican party is even more pressing than the decision to support the Democratic party. Sick of gun violence? It’s the Republican party that floods guns into black communities. Tired of police brutality? The National Fraternity of Police were the first to endorse Donald Trump and they are far more closely aligned with the Republicans than they are the Democrats. Want more investment is schools and communities? The Republican party is cutting services and development for poor black communities.
5. There are actual black activists that work in the community that work for the people. #ADOS isn’t them
#ADOS demands that they, a white nationalist bot farm, be the leadership of the black community. There are actual leaders that day and night do the difficult and often dangerous work of supporting black people and getting them to the polls. They deserve the positions of leadership and front-line privilege that #ADOS is trying to usurp. Not #ADOS. While leaders have been in the street protecting their communities, lifting them up, and getting them to the polls, the leaders of ADOS have been hanging out with white nationalists and racking up likes on twitter.
ADOS doesn’t have credit in the black community because they haven’t spent a day working in, with or for the black community. They’re a bunch of poverty pimps. They suck. And they are trash. #ADOSisTrash. White trash. White nationalist trash. ADOS is white trash.
