Just as Republicans pulled the plug on investigating the deadly January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, many of us were learning – for the first time in 100 years – of something called the Tulsa Race Massacre. It seems that the long and winding road from 1921 to 2021 is paved with deception.
A large Black community just outside of Tulsa was decimated by white Oklahomans in 1921. Some 300 Black men, women and children were murdered, thousands of homes were burned to the ground. Black businesses, schools and churches were destroyed.
As the great white fathers of Tulsa surveyed the ashes of their destruction, the obvious question was how to weigh, measure and record this brutal massacre so that future generations could learn from it. Their answer: Fuhgeddaboudit! They covered it up, claimed it was just another riot by uppity Blacks. The newspapers didn’t touch the real story and neither did the history textbooks.
The Tulsa Race Massacre, it turns out, was not unique to early 20th Century America. Similar atrocities of white mobs killing hundreds of Black people played out in Atlanta; East St. Louis; Chicago; Knoxville; Omaha; Chester, Pa.; Longview, Texas; Elaine, Ark.; Wilmington, Del.; and Washington, D.C., among numerous other cities. In each case, this murderous, torturous behavior of white citizens was treated as a deep, dark family secret. It took historians almost a century to extract and piece together these long-hidden truths.
Nearly a hundred years later, our nation’s capitol was invaded by an angry white supremacist mob of gun-toting, confederate flag-waving rebels, hell bent on stopping Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the country’s duly elected president. Five people died and more than 100 police officers were injured. What sayeth the great white fathers of the GOP on the matter of thoroughly investigating this treasonous incursion so that we never encounter a sequel? Their answer came directly from the script of their Tulsa forefathers: Fuhgeddaboudit! Best to just move on and pretend it didn’t happen. Again.
Here’s a truth that passed the test of time with flying colors: “The more things change,” wrote French author Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in 1849, “the more they stay the same.” Our world has changed in profound ways since 1921. We have Wi-Fi, Tesla and Zoom. We use words like “ideation” and “reimagine.” We take conference calls where we “circle back” and “unpack.” But when it comes to the politics of race, white conservatives still bury the truth and lie through their teeth like it was 1921.
And there is no bigger lie than this one: Systemic racism doesn’t exist. Former Vice President Mike Pence says it’s a “left-wing myth.” South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham says there is no systemic racism in America, only a few “bad actors.” Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton insists there is no sign of systemic racism in our country. Then there’s the multi-tasking Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves who, on a single Fox News appearance, denied the existence of systemic racism and proclaimed April as Confederate Heritage Month.
The same conservative crowd that pushed red states to make it harder for Black people to vote (based on the fabrication of rampant voter fraud), are now advocating legislation that would prohibit public schools from teaching about the way race influences politics, culture and the law. The bills are aimed at keeping students away from any notion of systemic racism. Such laws would forbid teaching about race, racism and white supremacy. Some measures go so far as to prohibit public universities from requiring diversity training.
Another key component of this legislative package requires teachers dealing with ugly historical episodes, or current racial controversies, to explore all sides of the issues “without giving deference to any one perspective.” Can you imagine a lesson plan outlining the pros and cons of lynching, or the murder of hundreds of Back people?
The insipid irony in all of this is that a legislative coverup of past and present racial oppression is, in itself, a form of the very systemic racism these Republican lawmakers swear does not exist. For better or worse, laws create systems. The system these head-in-the-sand legislators want is one where we pretend there is no racism, and that Blacks are on an equal footing with whites. And that the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 never happened.
The truth is that it is hard to find a system in this country that is not racially skewed to the detriment of Black people. Take, for example, our systems of education, home ownership and its redlining roots, employment, wealth accumulation and medical care. Although occasionally adjusted in response to issues of racial inequity, they all retain the same DNA that created them back in the days of slavery and Jim Crow.
Here’s where those systems have taken us:
- Median net wealth: White families: $188,200. Black families: $24,100.
- Median net wealth for people between the ages of 25 and 40: White: $41,800. Black: $3,500.
- Home ownership: 73.7 percent of whites own homes. 56 percent of Blacks do.
- Health insurance: Although Blacks make up 13.4 percent of the population, they account for half of the 30 million Americans who have no insurance.
- Education: Predominately Black public schools receive $2,226 less in per-pupil government aid than predominately white schools.
From a purely empirical perspective, systemic racism is as real as it gets. The far tougher question is how to dismantle a malignancy on our country’s soul that has been there for . . . well, forever? The only place to start is with the truth, no easy task in an environment where disinformation reigns supreme. Folks who believe that Donald Trump will be “reinstated” as president in August, are only too willing to accept the notion that America is a racist-free country.
Only a powerful and aggressive countermovement – by Democrats, non-Trumpian Republicans, independents, progressives, Green Party members and socialists – can deliver us from the diabolical illusions that are now the cornerstone of conservatism. Let’s start by stopping state legislatures from banning classroom discussion about the evils of racism.
Whitewashing the ugliness – past and present – only begets more ugliness.
While going through my dad’s files on family history (he was a very talented amateur genealogist), I ran across a decades-old clipping from a local Harford County, Maryland, paper. The article featured “man on the street” quotes from three locals, one of whom was an African American man with the surname Amos. For me it was like a punch in the gut. The shame of my mother’s family, which will haunt us and our descendants eternally, is our ancestors’ ownership of slaves in Harford County — not just a few, but many. While there were a few virtuous exceptions (Quakers, other abolition advocates, one or two owners who freed their slaves proactively, before being forced to do so anyway by emancipation), the indelible stain of this evil in my mom’s Amos and Gilbert lines must forever motivate subsequent generations to repair the damage done by our ancestors. It’s not just something we ought to do; it’s something we are required to do by the moral God of all monotheistic religious believers and the moral higher power of everyone else. P.S. to cousin Bruce: There’s no sign of this particular evil in our Penney line.
Beautifully said, Tom. Thanks. It embarrassingly struck me while reading your post that I never even entertained a thought about whether my mother’s or father’s family owned slaves. The whole repugnant concept seemed so foreign to my life, despite the reality that slavery and the Jim Crow follow-up were not that many generations in the past. Totally agree with you on our moral duty to repair the damages.
Bruce: Thanks for this insightful piece!
It reminds me of my favorite quote from Ernest Becker: “If everyone lives roughly the same lies about the same thing, there is no one to call them liars. They jointly establish their own sanity and see themselves as normal.”
Thanks, Tom. The Becker quote is perfect. Really captures what we are living through right now.