"RAW, ROCKY, and RUTHLESS". Tulsa, and America's racial legacy.

I'm glad that the rest of America is finally learning about the horrors of the Tulsa Massacre (Formally known as the Tulsa race riots to spin the cruelty of the event). It's about time. And it's a great example of no matter how uncomfortable it makes us feel, history has to be told as it happened.  

The following article about Tulsa from Elwood Watson is one of my favorites on the subject.  

"CNN, PBS, The History Channel, MSNBC, NPR, The New York Times, and the Washington Post were among the sizable number of media outlets that devoted considerable attention to the centennial of the Tulsa race massacre. The Tulsa race massacre was a racially directed American pogrom that claimed the lives of more than 300 people and annihilated the laboriously amassed wealth of an entire community and that, save for sporadic mentions, had gone largely ignored for 100 years.

From May 31 to June 1, 1921, supporters of local and prominent Tulsa political figures stormed into Tulsa’s Greenwood District, better known to its admirers as Black Wall Street, burning, looting, and destroying the entire neighborhood. This inhumane atrocity, for which no one was held accountable, was one of the most horrific acts of racial violence committed in the United States, and it is finally being candidly discussed after more than a century of being largely ignored.

The truth is that the sadistic carnage that occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma was not an aberration. Similar acts of racial barbarism took place in New York in 1863, Memphis and New Orleans in 1866, Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, Atlanta in 1906, Springfield, Illinois in 1908, St. Louis in 1917, Chicago in 1919, and Rosewood, Florida in 1922, just to name a few. If we are being honest, there were plenty of other places in America where armed mobs of unhinged Whites unleashed searing amounts of unprovoked and unjustified violence on Black citizens without suffering any consequences.

Mind you, these were all mass acts of violence where White mobs terrorized Black people. Add the number of deeply racially abominable practice of lynching to the equation, and the number goes up by thousands.

It was heartening to see President Biden visit Tulsa and acknowledge and commemorate what was, without a doubt, one of the darkest moments in our nation’s history. Such a gesture deserves applause.

Not surprisingly, many right-wing political, social, and cultural journalists, radio hosts, politicians and others of similar persuasion are doing everything in their power to eradicate, or at the very least, marginalize discussions on our nation’s history as it relates to race. The truth is that race, particularly as it pertains to aspects of the American history, is RAW, ROCKY, and RUTHLESS. The American legacy, as it relates to race, is not one of blue skies and apple pies.

All the sentiments like “We should let bygones be bygones,” “Let’s talk about the things that unite us, not divide us,” “We need to discuss examples of American exceptionalism,” and so on… Please! These are examples of conservative, snowflake ideology at its most pathetic!

Everybody knows the standard right-wing narrative that if Black people worked harder, did not do so many drugs, did not have children out of wedlock, went to church more often and refrained from indulging in their habitual levels of hedonism, then they, too, could partake in the fruits and rewards of the American dream like anybody else. Such fabricated, false rhetoric drips with denial at best and willful ignorance and intellectual dishonesty at worst. It is a perverse “blame the victim” sort of argument that has little, if any, basis in reality.

The irrefutable reality is that systemic and systematic racism have deeply affected Black America (and other indigenous populations) in the areas of finance, education, health, and every measurable social index available. These social ills have plagued and tortured Black America long before 1921 and have been doing so ever since. To pretend otherwise is to reside in a perverted fantasy devoid of reality. It is due to these factors that it is imperative that the Biden administration support reparations.

There have been many individuals, me included, who have written on the topic of reparations; thus, anyone who wants to familiarize themselves with the multiple debates surrounding the topic can do so with relative ease (https://link.medium.com/qNU9M8Z4Ngb). I think the most deft, succinct, and precise argument in support of the policy to date has been written by sociologists Rashawn Ray and Andre Perry, both senior fellows at the Brookings Institution (https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/BigIdeas_Ray_Perry_Reparations-1.pdf).

'“In short, a Black person who can trace their heritage to people enslaved in US states and territories should be eligible for financial compensation for slavery. Meanwhile, Black people who can show how they were excluded from various policies after emancipation should seek separate damages. (…) To determine qualification, birth records can initially be used to determine if a person was classified as Black American. Economist Sandy Darity asserts that people should show a consistent pattern of identification. Census records can then be used to determine if a person has consistently identified as Black American. Finally, DNA testing can be used as a supplement to determine lineage.”'

Spot-on analysis! While Tulsa and the similar tragedies may be part of the past, the residual effects of such atrocities are still reverberating within us more than a century later. Thus, President Biden must move with dogged speed to unabashedly support reparations, critical race theory, student loan forgiveness, and criminal justice reform and tackle voter suppression, chronic health care disparities, discriminatory housing laws, and other mounting injustices that plague far too many communities of color. He must do so with unalloyed aggression and without apology. The feelings and opinions of White bigots and other forms of White fragility be damned!" [Source]

*Historian, public speaker, and cultural critic Elwood Watson, PhD, is a professor at East Tennessee State University and the author of the recent book Keepin’ It Real: Essays on Race in Contemporary America (University of Chicago Press) that is available in paperback and Kindle via Amazon and other major book retailers