Rethinking Tulsa
“Why didn’t I learn about this in school?”
During TAP’s campaign in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I heard this phrase over and over again. Though it often comes from a good place, I think the general lack of shared knowledge about Tulsa and similar historical events present teachable moments. These moments are what made me want to start TAP Weekly. When confronted with an atrocity from the past that one was previously unaware of, the immediate thought process needs to change from “Why didn’t I know this?”to “What benefit is there in suppressing awareness of this?” These gaps in historical knowledge are far from accidental and thinking critically about why such gaps exist is crucial to understanding the world around us. Past actions will always shape the present, which is a common theme we will see again.
The Tulsa Race Massacre and its subsequent cover-up are a great place to begin this process of re-examining how to intake information about past occurrences. There’s a wealth of present-day arguments, lines of thinking, and rationalizations that are rendered obsolete by simply stating historical facts concerning Tulsa. A few examples of this include:
If you hear someone say anything resembling “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”- black people did multiple times. They got murdered for it. According to a 2018 article in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, if 1,200 median-priced houses in Tulsa got destroyed today it would mean a loss of around $150 million, not counting things like cash, personal belongings, and commercial property, might bring the total to over $200 million. It’s also crucial to remember that Tulsa was not the only Black Wall Street: Bronzeville, Hayti, Sweet Auburn, West Ninth Street, Farish Street, the list goes on (of the ones we currently know about). If each of those are worth as much as Tulsa, that’s around $1.2 billion gone, only counting race massacres; this doesn’t include revenue lost from slavery (since black people were not compensated for their forced labor), revenue lost from Jim Crow laws impeding how much black people could earn, et cetera. If Tulsa was taught in schools, we would’ve learned that black people formed self-sustaining communities that thrived and saw great economic success, essentially everything the American Dream purports to entail. It would crush any narrative about black laziness and learning about the ensuing massacre would counter the following two arguments at once.
If someone ever brings up shootings in a place like Chicago or Baltimore, or black-on-black crime statistics in general, remind them that the poverty rate in these places is 20.6% and 21.8%, respectively. These areas are also among the most gang-riddled areas of the United States, which goes hand and hand with the economic disparities present. Poverty creates an enormous lack of access to opportunities. Gangs often serve to fill this void, serving as a very direct path to both opportunity and community which feeds off the impoverished and creates a self-sustaining cycle. If Tulsa was taught in schools, there could be a direct link drawn from the stolen wealth of the past to the destitute conditions of the present. It would also show how those who earned the wealth and had it stripped from them have been unable to leave these conditions for generations because they don’t have the capital. Wealth is accumulated over decades and centuries, passed down from family member to family member as each builds on what they received. If you rob a group of people multiple times over those decades and centuries, you leave them with little capital and even fewer options. Demonizing the results of that robbery from a position of generational privilege becomes even more abhorrent when put into proper historical context.
On the subject of crime statistics that are used to paint black people as violent thugs, that’s a stereotype that’s been utilized for centuries by white supremacists to stoke fear in the hearts of people and justify things like slavery. Black people were seen as animals ready to be tamed by the superior white race, they were not viewed as people. Not only is that portrayal historically inaccurate, but if stealing billions of dollars in wealth through KKK-led race massacres indicates anything, it’s that those white supremacists were projecting. If Tulsa were taught in schools, it would open a dialogue on how a certain subset of white people has generationally gone out of their way to oppose black success in the name of white supremacy. There have been multiple race massacres mentioned in this article, but 1) that’s not even close to all of them and 2) that’s not the only way that white domestic terrorism has struck throughout time. There are admittedly difficult conversations that need to be had about this pattern before we can move forward.
By purposefully leaving out events such as Tulsa from history books, someone could tell black people to just work harder if they want to succeed, deflect from police brutality conversations to talk about violence in black communities, and reduce those in said communities to animalistic caricatures. If this sounds like someone you know, or if even you have done these things at some point, you can now see what the effect of learning mythology instead of history is. This is why Critical Race Theory (CRT) is so important, but that’s a post for another day.
As you expand your timeline of American history, parallels and connective lines begin to emerge, connecting the past to the present to the future. You begin to notice patterns that will help you going forward. This is only the first example. There’s plenty more to talk about, plenty more dots to connect, plenty more context to give. We’ll continue doing so next week at 2 PM.
