THE ADOS REPORT

This report may be freely republished and cited under the author’s by-line.

Abstract:

This Report shows that the American Descendants of Slavery advocacy and its various recent off-spring such as the National Assembly of American Slavery Descendants appear to have emerged from a right-wing sponsored advocacy clustered around supporters of former Republican U.S. Congressman and Presidential candidate Ron Paul of Texas and his son, the current Republican Junior U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. The Report further demonstrates that ADOS and its four de facto leaders — Yvette Carnell, Kevin Cosby, William Darity and Antonio Moore — primarily seek to use the issue of reparations to persuade a critical minority of African-American voters to refrain from voting for Democratic Party candidates, thereby ensuring the victory of radical right-wing Republicans of the Trumpist type, while simultaneously hollowing out the issue of reparations and creating toxic disunity within the African-American community.

THE FOUR LEADERS OF ADOS AND THE SUPPRESSION OF THE BLACK VOTE

The American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) is an on-line advocacy founded by Yvette Carnell, an Atlanta-based Black YouTube political commentator “around 2016” as she states. Ms. Carnell defines ADOS as a “political movement anchored in a linage” that is focused on achieving reparations for the past and present wrongs done to American citizens (who presently identify as black) and their ancestors and who are descended from Blacks enslaved in America.

Carnell argues that Blacks in America are culturally and, because of an admixture of white enslavers’ genes through rape, genetically wholly divorced from Africa, have no connection to Africa or, indeed, any connection to West Africa (Carnell: “We don’t even have a connectedness to the West Coast [of Africa]”) and thus are solely and uniquely American. Accordingly, Carnell vehemently rejects Pan-Africanism1, and prefers the use of the term ADOS and, lately, the archaic term “Negro” for Black Americans. Indeed, Ms. Carnell denies that there exists a separate African-American culture in the United States of any value. Nonetheless, ADOS has made some headway in America’s African-American community.

In addition to Carnell, three individuals are in de facto leadership of the ADOS advocacy: Reverend Kevin W. Cosby, PhD, a Black mega-church pastor and President of Simmons College who is based in Louisville, Kentucky; Antonio Moore, a Black former Los Angeles assistant prosecutor, former business partner of convicted crack cocaine wholesale dealer Rick “Freeway” Ross and currently a traffic court attorney; and William A. “Sandy” Darity, PhD, a Black public policy and economics professor at Duke University and co-author with his spouse, Kirsten Mullen, of the book “From Here To Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century”.

Darity views himself as a “member and a beneficiary of the [ADOS] community” and maintains that his engagement in what he terms the “ADOS movement” is centered on “whom (sic) should be eligible for receipt of black reparations in the US”. It should be noted that while Carnell and Moore distanced themselves from Darity in October of 2020, Darity as recently as February 12, 2021 affirmed his allegiance to ADOS. Since then various ADOS splinter groupings such as the National Assembly of American Slavery Descendants (NAASD or The Assembly) who originated as devoted followers of Carnell and Moore, to the chagrin of Carnell, have adopted Darity as their de facto ideological leader.

Rev. Kevin Cosby has been extremely helpful to Carnell’s ADOS advocacy. Not only did he make Simmons College available as the venue for an inaugural October 3–4, 2019 national ADOS conference, but on November 5, 2020 he proclaimed in his capacity as a Christian minister that American Blacks are sheep in need of shepherds and that God raised Yvette Carnell, Antonio Moore and “the ADOS movement” as the shepherds giving voice to the Black American “sheep”. In other words, per Rev. Cosby, Carnell, Moore and ADOS are anointed by God.

Two African-American celebrities stand out for their support of ADOS: Dr. Cornel West, who describes himself as “1 of America’s most provocative public intellectuals; a champion for racial justice through the traditions of the black Church, progressive politics, & jazz” and who, according to a New York Times report on ADOS’ inaugural Louisville conference dated November 13, 2019 in support of the ADOS leadership “told the assembled group that ‘polished professionals’ had taken over since Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X died.”

The second African-American celebrity is rapper and actor Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson). It is unclear to which extent Jackson’s support goes, however, as of February 11, 2021 it appears that Jackson and ADOS leader Antonio Moore collaborated to some extent on a revision to Jackson’s reparations-proposal “Contract with Black America”. Interestingly, Yvette Carnell denounced Jackson as an unqualified dilettante as recently as July 22, 2020.

Although they claim to fight for reparations, particularly on the federal level, there is no record of Carnell, Moore, Darity, Cosby and ADOS authoring a proposed federal reparations bill and lobbying any member of the U.S. Congress to introduce any such federal reparations bill. This is particularly curious in Carnell’s case. According to Carnell she worked for a number of years “on Capitol Hill for two Democrats” as well as for the Democratic Party National Committee.

Given Carnell’s and ADOS’ lack of legislative lobbying, the only reparations bill before the U.S. Congress at the present time is bill HR40 and it’s U.S. Senate equivalent S.1083.

HR40, introduced by U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas in the House and S.1083 introduced by U.S. Senator Corey Booker, Democrat of New Jersey in the Senate, once signed into law, would establish a commission tasked to develop concrete proposals for reparations by the United States to, per HR40’s language, the descendants of Africans “who were enslaved in the United States and colonies that became the United States from 1619 to 1865” for injuries inflicted specifically on African-Americans. HR40 establishes these injuries as a non-debatable fact.

HR40 was co-authored by the legislative commission of the National Coalition for Reparations for Blacks in America (N’COBRA) America’s oldest African-American reparations advocacy group founded in 1987. In addition, N’COBRA has developed and widely published a strategic and tactical campaign to get both the House and the Senate reparations bills enacted.

On June 19, 2019 the U.S. House Judiciary Sub-Committee on Constitutional Civil Rights and Liberties held a hearing on HR40. The Committee solicited ADOS leader William Darity’s in-person testimony at that hearing. Dr. Darity declined to attend. Instead, to the bemusement of Carnell, he opted to attend a conference, the Angela Project, organized by Rev. Kevin Cosby and, as Darity asserts, by Yvette Carnell and Antonio Moore.

Consequently, Darity merely submitted some written testimony to the Sub-Committee demanding a number of edits to HR40 including a limitation of African-American’s enslavement justice claim to the 89 year period from 1776 to 1865 instead of 1619 (the year the first enslaved Africans were sold into Virginia) to 1865 (the year of the abolition of slavery in the United States). The argument Darity makes in support of limiting reparations to this reduced time period is that the United States did not exist before 1776.

While this is inaccurate, as the United States existed before 1776 in the form of the United Colonies, it is also irrelevant. HR40 specifically addresses “the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865”. (Emphasis added). As N’COBRA recently tweeted: “The U.S. government [via HR40] has made themselves Accountable since 1619. So Darity, ADOS & Trump want to fight the U.S. government to reduce the Accountability of oppression they already confessed to?”

While Carnell, Darity and ADOS have yet to develop any kind of proposed federal reparations bill, their focus in practice has been to vigorously oppose HR40 as “making a mockery of [Black American’s] justice claim” and to vehemently attack N’COBRA for its support of HR40 and for N’COBRA’s embedding the specific African-American history of white-supremacist induced injuries in the context of the overall Pan-African experience with white supremacy.

ADOS generally, and Darity in particular, oppose any reparations effort developed on a level other than federal as counterproductive incrementalism. ADOS leader Antonio Moore, however, recently made an approving exception to California’s AB3121 reparations bill authored by African-American then-California Assemblywoman and current California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and passed into law in that state in the fall of 2020. AB3121, while not as comprehensive as HR40, generally is patterned after and uses much of the language of HR40, including HR40’s enslavement period from 1619 to 1865.

Given their general opposition to non-federal reparations initiatives, Carnell, Darity and ADOS recently denounced a concrete, first step, reparations effort by the city of Evanston, Illinois as “fake reparations”. Indeed, Darity claimed in a March 28, 2021 Washington Post opinion piece that the Evanston effort was limited to a mere housing program and thus was not reparations. A recent analysis posted on Twitter showed that Darity’s assessment is inaccurate.

In sum, while ADOS and its four leaders are long on apparent pro-reparations rhetoric they fall woefully short on any kind of their own actual pro-reparations legislative and other campaigns. Simultaneously, they severely denounce those organizations and political forces, including the Democratic Party (of which party prominent U.S. congressional members, guided by N’COBRA, introduced reparations legislation and in California enacted such legislation) which actually are doing reparations work as unwilling, ineffective, incompetent and fakers.

ADOS and its leadership, having identified the Democratic Party and N’COBRA as supposed fakers, in early 2019 offered a simple solution to Black Americans: A campaign to deny the Democratic Party Presidential candidate the Presidency of the United States. Dubbed “vote down-ballot” the campaign aimed to get African-Americans to refrain from voting in the 2020 Biden vs. Trump U.S. Presidential election. Despite Carnell’s break with Dr. Darity, Darity never opposed this “vote down ballot strategy” while simultaneously striking out for a mysterious “third possibility”.

The goal of ADOS’ “vote down-ballot campaign”, as Yvette Carnell admitted on March 1, 2021 during the following exchange in her call-in YouTube show, was to cause Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s election loss as well as a Democratic loss of a 2021 senatorial race in Georgia in order, as she asserted, to advance ADOS’ “freedom struggle”. A “freedom struggle” as demonstrated above, that is devoid of any positive action whatsoever. In that exchange Carnell vowed to cause such Democratic Party election losses in the future:

Caller:

“I’m here in Georgia and we need to understand that, if just 20 percent of us don’t vote for these Democrats the President wouldn’t get elected, we wouldn’t have those two so-called blue Senators. None of that would happen. And that needs to happen in order for them to sit up and take notice.

Yvette Carnell:

“Let me tell you something. Blue ain’t Black and Black ain’t ADOS. There you go. Blue ain’t Black and Black ain’t ADOS. Tell me about voting blue all the time. No, the blue don’t trickle down to me. What you talking about? Not enough for me to come out and do all this stuff and do all this heavy lifting . Listen. That’s why I told people. If we had had cost Biden the election — people want come and say you wouldn’t want to cost Biden the election — I don’t care! If we did then we could come back and say, listen we intentionally cost you the election. If Democrats want to get elected the next time around I’m going to tell you what you got to do. I’m going to tell my people not to vote top of the ballot again or any of these other little people [the two Democratic Party Georgia U.S. senators] who are in the way of our and all the stuff we’re trying to do in terms of our freedom struggle. That’s what it is.” (Emphasis added)

In contrast to ADOS’ non-existing federal reparations legislative action, it is this ADOS “vote down-ballot” campaign, and solely this ADOS campaign, which proved to be extraordinarily robust. Conducted overwhelmingly via social media, specifically Twitter, an ADOS Twitter Network of thousands of accounts launched millions of tweets of “vote down ballot” into the social media sphere.

A peer-reviewed study published by Harvard’s Kennedy School on January 18, 2021 entitled “Disinformation Creep: ADOS and the strategic weaponization of breaking news” analyzed “a sample of a data set made up of 534 thousand scraped tweets, supplemented with access to 1.36 million tweets from the Twitter firehose, from accounts that used the #ADOS hashtag between November 2019 and September 2020”. The analysis exposed a highly coordinated massive ADOS Twitter network campaign to discourage black voters from voting in the Presidential election via Carnell’s “down-ballot” strategy. The data analyzed included “a total of 1.1 million tweets using the #ADOS hashtag that were publicly visible on Twitter as of the end of 2020”. The data set used has been made freely available to the public by the Harvard Study authors.

In response, Yvette Carnell on January 21, 2021 accused Harvard of “coordinated smears”, as a “rich white institution punching down” and characterized the study as a “hit piece” containing “BLATANT and easily disprovable lies”. She promised an “official response” which to this date has still not been forthcoming.

Darity, on January 23, 2021 attacked the Harvard study as shoddy. A responsive challenge to Darity that he ought to undergird his “shoddy research” statement with his own statistical analysis of the data set made available has remained unanswered.

The authors of the Harvard Study assert that ADOS leaders demonstrated a “lack of concern with the continuing wave of the COVID crisis, which is disproportionately devastating Black communities”. They argue that ADOS did so by its “competing messages — that not voting will build the political power of Black communities versus voting for (among other interests) a platform of effective and equitable management of COVID-19 that will save Black lives and stem the economic hardship — are akin to the ‘information fog,’ creating a profusion of conflicting information to undermine the ability of a society to establish a factual reality.”

ADOS leader Antonio Moore, on February 11, 2021 in response addressed what he termed “the Untruthful Harvard Research Paper” mostly by demonstrating that he had made previous warning statements about the Covid 19 crisis. However, Moore failed to attempt to disprove the central theme of the Harvard Study, namely the hundreds of thousands-fold “vote down-ballot” Twitter ADOS Network tweets nor did he address the Harvard Study’s mixed messages argument.

The apparently erratic and contradictory behavior of ADOS and its leadership attracted the attention of a number of leading African-American activists.

On January 2, 2020, African-American reparations activist Jessica Ann Mitchell Aiwuyor published a research report entitled “Understanding ADOS: The Movement to Hijack Black Identity and Weaken Black Unity”.

Among other facts, Aiwuyor revealed that Yvette Carnell had joined the board of the late white supremacist John Tanton-sponsored white supremacist front group, the anti-immigrant organization Progressives For Immigration Reform (PFIR). Tanton specialized in creating front groups that ostensibly advocate “progressive” and “environmentalist” causes in order to advance his not-so-hidden underlying actual agenda: the prevention of the decline of white America by curbing non-white immigration. Said Tanton in a leaked, December 10, 1993, letter to white supremacist Garrett Hardin: “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”

Accordingly, Aiwuyor made a strong case that Carnell and her movement were, at the very least, akin to a white right-wing front group.

It was not until the recent diligent research efforts of a twitter blogger that this background came into clearer focus. In his research the twitter blogger had mined the Internet Archive in order to find any relevant articles that Yvette Carnell might have deleted from her blog.

The twitter blogger struck gold. It turned out that Yvette Carnell as early as 2012 was a supporter of right-wing libertarian Republican U.S. Congressman and U.S. Presidential candidate Ron Paul. Nor was she a champion of anti-racism or reparations:

“Sorry black folks, but race and racism are not the biggest issues of the 21st century and to imagine otherwise is to conflate the issue and put the needs of your community ahead of the needs of America in particular and the global community in general. In that way, it’s a selfish usurpation of the political agenda to placate the few, and it shouldn’t be tolerated by black people of conscience.” (Emphasis added)

The above passage was authored by Yvette Carnell on January 2, 2012 and was cited in various blog and other commentaries on Carnell. The link that led to the actual quote on Carnell’s blog for many month now has yielded an “OOPS! Page you’re looking for doesn’t exist”. The article had been deleted by Carnell. The twitter blogger rediscovered it on the Internet Archive.

Ron Paul, a former Republican U.S. Congressman from Texas notorious for his right-wing libertarian views and the anti-Black and anti-Semitic racist rants of his newsletters, is the father of Rand Paul, the current, equally right-wing, junior Republican United States Senator from Kentucky.

Carnell’s January 2, 2012 post decries pundit Andrew Sullivan’s reversal of Sullivan’s endorsement of Ron Paul’s 2012 run for President. Previously, on December 21, 2011, Carnell had dismissed Ron Paul’s racist rants as mere inconsequential, politically insignificant, twenty-year old rhetoric.

On February 12, 2016 Carnell followed up on her right-wing admonition of the African-American community that “it’s a selfish usurpation of the political agenda to placate the few” and to “and put the needs of your community ahead of the needs of America”. Appearing on “Real News” with moderator Jared Ball, Carnell reprimanded reparations advocate Ta-Nehisi Coates, echoed Ron Paul’s “anti-identity politics” rhetoric, derided Coats for his “black identity politics”, and opposed group-specific reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans in America. As per Carnell, everyone, black or not, deserved reparations — as long as they were poor:

“I would tell everyone that I am in favor of reparations. But reparations for me looks a lot like what Bernie Sanders defined. Reparations for me is massive investments in poor communities. And for me the whole problem with Ta-Nehisi Coates and what he did — what he did, to me, was really intellectually bankrupt. What he is asking Black people to do is follow this type of identity politics, this kind of black identity politics. Everything has to be about us being Black people as opposed to anything being about us being poor people — disproportionately poor. And he wants us to follow down that road. Which really is a road to nowhere. It leads to a goose egg.” (Emphasis added)

The above statement is in sharp contrast to a statement Carnell made on June 22, 2019. There she claimed that

“#ADOS began with @tonetalks & I on YouTube, probably beginning to build a reparations & Black Agenda case around 2016. For me it actually began before that with Obama.” (Emphasis added).

On March 7, 2017 Ms. Carnell asserted that European-Americans are not immigrants, but native citizens and that Trump supporters have a superior understanding of the American condition:

“Even native citizens who are white should not be treated the way these immigrants are treated. These are native people. There’s supposed to be some value to citizenship. What Obama is doing and the Democratic Party as a whole is convincing you is that there is nothing special about you. You’re just like the person who just crossed the border.”

Carnell continues:

“Let’s be honest about one thing. Everybody says we’re all immigrants if we’re not Native Americans. That’s not true. Let me tell you what happened. And its an ugly, ugly story. One that I don’t agree with. I don’t agree with just slaughtering people and taking their stuff. But that’s what happened. These people came here, who founded this country, came here and slaughtered the Native Americans and founded a new country. It’s not the same thing. That’s called a conquest. That’s not the same country anymore. They took it over, snatched it from the people that had it and created something new. We’re not like a nation of immigrants. And that’s what Obama wants you to believe. At least the people who supported Trump are like understanding that there’s supposed to be some value to citizenship. They realize America is in decline and that there are no more benefits to that citizenship.” (Emphasis added)

Meanwhile, in 2013, Dr. Kevin Cosby, professed his fervent admiration for Ron Paul’s equally right wing son, United States Senator Rand Paul. Senator Paul, as of late, is on record for designating the Black Lives Matter Movement as a “terrorist organization”.

Tweeted Kevin Cosby on September 17, 2013: “I have heard no national politician speak on the substantive issues that effect African-Americans like Senator Rand Paul.” After an uproar by Louisville’s African-American community, the evangelist on November 23, 2013 backtracked a bit and issued a statement “clarifying” his enthusiastic pro-Rand Paul tweets as political expedience. Cosby then proceeded to work closely with Rand Paul as an advisor on African-American issues.

In sum, it is safe to conclude that Aiwuyor is correct. The ADOS advocacy and its various recent off-spring such as NAASD appear to have emerged from a right-wing sponsored advocacy that seeks to use the issue of reparations to persuade a critical minority of African-American voters to refrain from voting for Democratic Party candidates, thereby ensuring the victory of radical right-wing Republicans of the Trumpist type, while simultaneously hollowing out the issue of reparations and creating toxic disunity within the African-American community.

April 12, 2021, revised April 21, 2021

Michael K. Fisher

1There are varied interpretations of “Pan-Africanism”. However, it can be safely stated that they all agree that Pan-Africanism at a minimum is a political strategy which advocates the global unity of people of African descent in order to oppose and defeat global and local structural and institutional anti-Black racism.