Authors 🇧🇧 Ethereal Bisexual Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

7 days 30 days All time Recent Popular
As of the last time I checked, @NSBPInc President-Elect Hakeem Oluseyi’s blog entry that seeks to exonerate homophobic federal admin James Webb still contains what I consider to be potentially libelous comments about me, one of the only openly queer faculty in the organization.

"The...article references a professional astrophysicist as his original source for learning about the allegations against Webb. This scientist propagated unsubstantiated false information as if it were true without performing proper scientific rigor to investigate its veracity."

This comment specifically cites an article on
https://t.co/5MxzND1CGW by Matthew Francis where Francis says that he first learned about the allegations against Webb because of me. Francis does not identify me as an authority nor does he quote me as an authoritative source.

I believe that what Francis was (quite reasonably) referring to is seeing me tweet The Stranger article by Dan Savage.

Oluseyi takes it a step further by insinuating that I knowingly made false statements and claiming that I did not investigate.

Oluseyi has no evidence.

Again, I want to highlight that the president elect of the National Society of Black Physicists wrote an essay, claiming to support queer people, where he makes a point of impugning the integrity of the only openly queer faculty member in the org, who is also early career.
I woke up this morning really pissed off that I had to write this thread because a senior guy who doesn’t like me very much just happened to write this article about things I was tweeting about and in the process downplayed homophobia and got the story wrong 😡


I’m pissed also at everyone who read that blog entry and walked away thinking, “oh he sounds like a good guy who has been unfairly maligned who should have a space telescope named after him.” Excuse me, what?

Most of you would never been foolish enough in 2021 to say such a thing about a man who sanctioned institutional anti-Black racism but you think that’s an ok message to send to queer people, including Black queer people?

And he’s gonna get away with it too. No matter what I say, that blog entry will keep making the rounds and people will believe it even though it hasn’t been through a formal edit and fact check process.

Next time Hakeem should maybe send me an email rather than write vague, unprofessional personal attacks like: "astrophysicist who propagated unsubstantiated false information as if it were true without performing proper scientific rigor to investigate its veracity"