When I moved to California for college, I found that I could use my hometown as a sort of quirk about me, a surprising truth to deploy in a round of Two Truths and a Lie. “You don’t seem like you’re from Oklahoma,” people would say, a comment I interpreted as a compliment. Though it would take me years to fully unpack this, even then I knew there were things about my home to be embarrassed and even ashamed of. In my new surroundings on a liberal college campus in California, something that had been the most boring fact about me back in Tulsa, Oklahoma was now fun party fodder. Nobody in my dorm had heard of Tulsa. Nobody could even locate Oklahoma on a map.
Over the past decade, however, Tulsa has begun to make national news more frequently. To name a few reasons….It has climate change denying politicians, a Trump rally originally scheduled near Greenwood on Juneteenth during a pandemic, police violence and the murders of Black residents including Terence Crutcher and Joshua Barre, anti-choice legislation, high female incarceration rates, and, recently, a ban on teaching critical race theory. Needless to say, telling people I’m from Tulsa, Oklahoma, has come to feel more fraught than frivolous.
Though my parents taught me about the Tulsa Race Massacre when I was a child, I never learned about it at my private school. My classes never discussed how one of the nation’s deadliest instances of racial violence occurred in our city, how a mob of 10,000 white people descended on one of the nation’s most prosperous Black neighborhoods, Greenwood, in North Tulsa, then referred to as “Black Wall Street.” None of our history books or lectures addressed the white mob that set the fires that ravaged more than thirty-five square blocks, killing hundreds of Black Tulsans, injuring thousands, and leaving thousands homeless. We didn’t learn that while the massacre was the deadliest, it was not an isolated incident, that from 1911-1923, white mobs carried out 23 lynchings of Black Oklahomans. And we certainly didn’t learn about the other lasting effects of the massacre, such as the emotional trauma of such violence or the growing generational wealth that Black residents lost overnight.
In his essay, "Living in the Age of the White Mob,” Victor Luckerson traces the history of the white mob from lynchings and massacres such as the Tulsa Race Massacre to the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. Luckerson writes: “The white mob persists, in part, because it is not a source of national shame, nor of many people’s personal shame."
While I’m no scholar of psychology, I do find value in experiencing shame even if it’s shame about something that I wasn’t personally responsible for. Even though I wasn’t a part of the white mob in 1921, I benefited from growing up white in Tulsa, a city built on horrific systemic racism, particularly visible in the city’s health and housing disparities. I do and should feel shame about this. This shame motivates me in the way I vote, in what I write, and in how I try to live my life.
With the recent ban on teaching critical race theory in Oklahoma, this newsletter, if presented in an academic setting, would be banned, as it seems that acknowledging white privilege isn’t allowed. According to the Washington Post, “Oklahoma’s new law, for instance, says public school classes should not include the idea that “any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”” As if the psychological distress resulting from recognizing one’s privilege is a bad thing. As if such distress and shame can’t be used as motivation for doing better, for acknowledging the past and working to be an anti-racist moving forward, for supporting reparations, for fighting to dismantle systemic racism.
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Though I stayed in California after college and remain here today, I’ve been watching from afar as Tulsa marks the centennial. President Biden is meeting with the remaining survivors, yet will outcome of that meeting be more than mere symbolism? The survivors sure deserves more. Tulsa’s Black community deserve more. Reparations are overdue.
As Chief Egunwale Amusan, president of the Tulsa African Ancestral Society writes, “Time has not and will not heal these wounds. The only way to truly move forward is to tackle the darkness of our past head on. As we approach the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, there can be no better way to honor the survivors and descendants than by passing H.R. 40 to begin a long overdue national reckoning.”
And if that reckoning is motivated in part by shame, so be it.
Related reading and endorsements:
Caleb Gayle’s feature in the New York Times Magazine, “100 Years After the Tulsa Massacre, What Does Justice Look Like?” | Victor Luckerson’s exploration into an important reparations case in Rosewood, Florida. | Data visualization of what the Tulsa Race Massacre destroyed. | Anneliese M. Bruner, the descendent of a Tulsa Race Massacre survivor on intergenerational trauma. | An attempt at land reparations in Manhattan Beach, California. | “The Women Who Preserved the Story of the Tulsa Race Massacre”
Victor Luckerson’s newsletter, Run It Back, is an invaluable resource on the Tulsa Race Massacre.
I also endorse The Black Wall Street Times for Tulsa-related coverage.
Thanks for reading.
-RJZ