learned new things today
May. 13th, 2010 04:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I watched a documentary this afternoon (got out of TA seminar to go!) about the Tulsa massacre of 1921, about which I had never heard, in which the city of Tulsa armed its white citizens for a riotous assault on what was until then known as Black Wall Street. Seriously--after they killed at least 300 people and making 10,000 people homeless, apparently there were ads in the local newspaper asking the marauders to give the borrowed guns back. !!!#(*$#&%&!!!!!
The documentary is called Before They Die, and I saw parts 4-8 of 8, which were mostly about a group of survivors seeking reparations (mostly, it seems they want an official apology from Tulsa, the current government speaking for the old, but concrete reparations too of course). Yes, there are still several survivors, some of whom bear serious injuries from the event; one was 105 in the movie and died this year. Yes, it took years, and was rejected with the all-around winning argument of "they got away with it for so long that it doesn't count".
There were three speakers in a roundtable discussion after the event; I was late to my 'cello lesson but wish I could have stayed longer. One, Reggie Turner, helped make the documentary, and according to him there is a half-hour version they're making freely available to any schools who want to teach the Tulsa Massacre.
Another, Sandy Darity (professor at Duke), wants financial reparations, based on the 40 acres idea in current value, to be made to people who a) have an ancestor who was enslaved before 1865, and b) have at some point in the last 10 years listed themselves as African-American or semantic equivalents(?). He thought that it would first take a lot of work to persuade people that this was the right thing to do, and that it might work to base claims on the Jim Crow period rather than slavery; unfortunately, the President is against it, as I believe are the other two speakers. Reparations are worth serious thought, despite the difficult logistics: I don't see it as dredging up the past, but rather trying to fix the present. I read that white Americans on average have eight times the wealth of black Americans, where "wealth" is defined to include assets rather than just income. I don't know how that breaks down in terms of what most people get. But I do know that systemic racism against African-Americans is a reality no-one seems to want to see or talk about, and a bit of empowerment would help. I asked a rather ambiguous question about how to frame these actions and stories in terms of the present, rather than letting people acknowledge past problems only when safely in the past, and dismiss present problems as things that are sure to go away on their own in the future (or the fault of the victims, as Darity pointed out). It'd have been lovely to get an answer (the best one seems to be "educate the public through current media, like films and music"); I mostly wanted to express appreciation for this aspect of the film, and see if people there saw the same time-avoidance problem I did, and apparently they do.
One of the worst things in the entire documentary were the mercifully brief contributions by a somewhat smarmy lawyer defending Tulsa. He said it would be hard to do anything without proof (there is plenty of proof, some new as of 2007); he questioned the survivors' motives since they waited this long (no-one would take their case, but when they got one lawyer he recruited more); he later said that the whole city was not responsible for the actions of a "few" people despite the total lack of local law enforcement, and in an amazing application of double standards within about 30 seconds, said that the few people who showed up *bearing* guns in order to prevent a lynching "brought [the entire massacre] on themselves" [all of Greenwood]. Ding-ding-ding! Victim-blaming in the extreme; too bad that's not worthy of contempt of court! He might as well have gone the whole hog and said that they brought it on themselves by daring to successfully acquire homes in Greenwood in the first place. (snark)
It was upsetting, the whole documentary and the fact that I don't remember learning of this and hardly heard of similar atrocities (lynchings yes, massacres no), though I did know that there were black communities doing better before the early 20th century backlash. But maybe I am getting closer to understanding what to do. According to Darity, this now-rejected case is a good example of why the Statute of Limitations must die (or something). The Lilly Ledbetter case is another famous example, of course.
The documentary is called Before They Die, and I saw parts 4-8 of 8, which were mostly about a group of survivors seeking reparations (mostly, it seems they want an official apology from Tulsa, the current government speaking for the old, but concrete reparations too of course). Yes, there are still several survivors, some of whom bear serious injuries from the event; one was 105 in the movie and died this year. Yes, it took years, and was rejected with the all-around winning argument of "they got away with it for so long that it doesn't count".
There were three speakers in a roundtable discussion after the event; I was late to my 'cello lesson but wish I could have stayed longer. One, Reggie Turner, helped make the documentary, and according to him there is a half-hour version they're making freely available to any schools who want to teach the Tulsa Massacre.
Another, Sandy Darity (professor at Duke), wants financial reparations, based on the 40 acres idea in current value, to be made to people who a) have an ancestor who was enslaved before 1865, and b) have at some point in the last 10 years listed themselves as African-American or semantic equivalents(?). He thought that it would first take a lot of work to persuade people that this was the right thing to do, and that it might work to base claims on the Jim Crow period rather than slavery; unfortunately, the President is against it, as I believe are the other two speakers. Reparations are worth serious thought, despite the difficult logistics: I don't see it as dredging up the past, but rather trying to fix the present. I read that white Americans on average have eight times the wealth of black Americans, where "wealth" is defined to include assets rather than just income. I don't know how that breaks down in terms of what most people get. But I do know that systemic racism against African-Americans is a reality no-one seems to want to see or talk about, and a bit of empowerment would help. I asked a rather ambiguous question about how to frame these actions and stories in terms of the present, rather than letting people acknowledge past problems only when safely in the past, and dismiss present problems as things that are sure to go away on their own in the future (or the fault of the victims, as Darity pointed out). It'd have been lovely to get an answer (the best one seems to be "educate the public through current media, like films and music"); I mostly wanted to express appreciation for this aspect of the film, and see if people there saw the same time-avoidance problem I did, and apparently they do.
One of the worst things in the entire documentary were the mercifully brief contributions by a somewhat smarmy lawyer defending Tulsa. He said it would be hard to do anything without proof (there is plenty of proof, some new as of 2007); he questioned the survivors' motives since they waited this long (no-one would take their case, but when they got one lawyer he recruited more); he later said that the whole city was not responsible for the actions of a "few" people despite the total lack of local law enforcement, and in an amazing application of double standards within about 30 seconds, said that the few people who showed up *bearing* guns in order to prevent a lynching "brought [the entire massacre] on themselves" [all of Greenwood]. Ding-ding-ding! Victim-blaming in the extreme; too bad that's not worthy of contempt of court! He might as well have gone the whole hog and said that they brought it on themselves by daring to successfully acquire homes in Greenwood in the first place. (snark)
It was upsetting, the whole documentary and the fact that I don't remember learning of this and hardly heard of similar atrocities (lynchings yes, massacres no), though I did know that there were black communities doing better before the early 20th century backlash. But maybe I am getting closer to understanding what to do. According to Darity, this now-rejected case is a good example of why the Statute of Limitations must die (or something). The Lilly Ledbetter case is another famous example, of course.