[ This year marks 100 years since the Tulsa Race Massacre, where
roughly 300 people — predominantly Black people — were killed;
Black churches, schools and businesses were burned to the ground, and
the homes of Black people were looted.] [[link removed]]

THE TULSA RACE MASSACRE WENT WAY BEYOND “BLACK WALL STREET”  
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George Yancy and Robin D.G. Kelley
June 1, 2021
Truthout
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_ This year marks 100 years since the Tulsa Race Massacre, where
roughly 300 people — predominantly Black people — were killed;
Black churches, schools and businesses were burned to the ground, and
the homes of Black people were looted. _

The 1921 Tulsa race massacre wrought widespread destruction. In
addition to acknowledging the horror of that particular event, we must
confront the systemic, genocidal, state-sanctioned, racist violence
that is pervasive in the United States., United States Library of
Congress via Wikipedia // Truthout

 

There is so much grieving that Black people have yet to do. The
grammar of our suffering from anti-Black racism has yet to be fully
created.

As we currently deal with the pervasiveness of Black suffering,
mourning and grief related to anti-Black racism, there has been a
great deal of media coverage acknowledging that this year marks 100
years since the Tulsa Race Massacre, where roughly 300 people —
predominantly Black people — were killed; Black churches, schools
and businesses were burned to the ground, and the homes of Black
people were looted. Yet, it is still not clear to me that white
America is ready to acknowledge how Black people have suffered and
continue to suffer under systemic white racism.

In this moment of collective remembrance of the Tulsa Race Massacre, I
asked the brilliant scholar Robin D. G. Kelley to provide his
reflections. Kelley offers a deep analysis that provides a
counternarrative (a powerful X-ray) of the massacre that allows us to
see deep issues embedded within racial capitalism that impacted poor
working-class Black people and sustained Indigenous suffering.

In our discussion, we move from the importance of critical race theory
as a framework for critiquing liberalism and the founding myths of the
U.S., to questions of differential Black suffering, to a liberated
planet. Kelley, who is the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair of U.S. History
at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and contributing
editor for the_ Boston Review_, provides us with complex realities
that are braided and require our collective efforts without losing
sight of our specific oppressions with their accompanying lived
experiences. Kelley is the author of several books,
including _Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination;_ _Hammer
and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression; _and the
forthcoming _Black Bodies Swinging: An American
Postmortem_ (Metropolitan Books).

GEORGE YANCY: ACCORDING TO ACCOUNTS OF THE TULSA RACE MASSACRE,
AIRPLANES WERE USED TO DROP FIREBOMBS ON THE GREENWOOD DISTRICT IN
TULSA, OKLAHOMA, WHICH WAS KNOWN AS BLACK WALL STREET. WHEN I THINK
ABOUT THIS, THE IRONIES ABOUND. THEY SAY, “BLACK PEOPLE ARE LAZY.”
YET, BLACK PEOPLE IN THE GREENWOOD DISTRICT IN TULSA WERE KNOWN FOR
THEIR AFFLUENCE, ECONOMIC POWER AND SELF-RELIANT DILIGENCE. AND THEY
SAY, “BLACK PEOPLE ARE CAPRICIOUS, THEY LOOT, THEY DESTROY
PROPERTY.” OVER 1,000 BLACK HOMES WERE BURNED TO THE GROUND THROUGH
ACTS OF WHITE TERRORISM IN TULSA. THE OVERLAP OF EVENTS AT THIS MOMENT
IS SO CRUCIAL. HOW DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE CURRENT DISCUSSIONS OF THE
MASSACRE IN VARIOUS PUBLIC SPHERES (INCLUDING IN LEFT-WING MEDIA AND
MAINSTREAM MEDIA BUT ALSO IN CONSERVATIVE MEDIA) AND WHAT THIS SAYS
ABOUT THE CURRENT POLITICAL MOMENT IN RELATION TO CONTESTATIONS OVER
THE EXISTENCE OF WHITE SUPREMACY, SYSTEMIC RACISM AND THE STRUGGLE FOR
RACIAL JUSTICE?

ROBIN D.G. KELLEY: George, it is always an honor to be in
conversation with you. Your questions are always incisive; they cut to
the core of the issue.

Certainly, the Tulsa race massacre can possibly be one avenue for the
country to “acknowledge” historic and ongoing Black suffering
through some kind of truth, reconciliation and reparations process.
I’m skeptical for several reasons. For one thing, we keep repeating
the mantra that this story is unknown. Although it was front page news
in 1921, and although a resident/survivor Mary E. Jones Parrish
self-published an eyewitness account in 1923, and although Black
residents filed 193 unsuccessful lawsuits against the city and various
insurance companies for just compensation, we still talk as if this is
all new and shocking knowledge. The Oklahoma Commission to Study the
Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (now called the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot
Centennial Commission) was created 24 years ago. The indefatigable
historian, Eddie Faye Gates, spent years collecting oral histories of
survivors.

Why do we continually repeat the assertion that this history is
completely unknown, a secret, or so shameful no one wants to talk
about it? Because the issue _has never been about not knowing_; it is
about a refusal to acknowledge genocidal, state-sanctioned racist
violence in the United States.

“60 Minutes” ran a devastating segment on the massacre in 1999,
and I swear, every year since, journalists (print and broadcast) have
announced the discovery of this terrible history and found some Black
person to interview who has never heard of it. Meanwhile, literally
dozens of books have appeared on the Tulsa race massacre, going back
at least to the 1970s when Lee E. Williams and Lee E. Williams II
published _Anatomy of Four Race Riots_ (1972) and a white history
professor, Rudia Halliburton Jr., published a short book aptly
titled, _The Tulsa Race War of 1921_ (1975). Then in 1982, Scott
Ellsworth released _Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of
1921_, followed by a parade of very fine books by James Hirsch,
Hannibal Johnson, Tim Madigan, Alfred Brophy, and so on…

The point, of course, is that for at least 40 years, there was no
shortage of public information. Even before these texts appeared, it
is not hard to find mention or detailed yet flawed accounts of the
Tulsa massacre in the pages of leading Black scholarly journals
— _Journal of Negro History_, _Phylon_, _Journal of Negro
Education_, etc. (Rudia Halliburton’s book began as an essay
in _The Journal of Black Studies_ published in 1972). Besides stacks
of books — scholarly, popular, photographic, fiction and young adult
— there have been plays written about it as well as several
documentary films, some bearing titles, such as _Tulsa’s
Secret;_ _Terror in Tulsa: History Uncovered; The Tulsa Lynching of
1921: A Hidden Story;_ all before _Watchmen_ and Stanley Nelson and
Marco Williams’s brand new and powerful film, _Tulsa Burning._

The fact is, the Tulsa race massacre is the most thoroughly studied
and discussed incident of all of the 20th century racial pogroms, with
the possible exception of the East St. Louis massacre of 1917. I’ve
been in the business of teaching Black history for over three decades,
and every colleague I know includes Tulsa in their general survey
courses. So why do we continually repeat the assertion that this
history is completely unknown, a secret, or so shameful no one wants
to talk about it? Because the issue _has never been about not
knowing_; it is about a refusal to acknowledge genocidal,
state-sanctioned racist violence in the United States, a refusal to
recognize the existence of fascism in this country. This is not to say
the violence is simply denied by the status quo. No, rather it is
disavowed by the white propertied and political classes and displaced
onto “ignorant” white racist workers. This narrative obscures how
the violence, fomented and promoted by the press and business
interests, became a pretext to take the land — an attempted land
grab that continued for decades after 1921.

But there is more. I find the whole class politics around the way we
continue to frame the story of Tulsa is not only disturbing, but it
actually serves to distort and erase the exploitation and oppression
of the majority of Black people. And by “we,” I also mean Black
folks. Let me explain.

This is what we know: two days of racist violence left an estimated
300 people dead, hundreds more injured, and more than 1,200
Black-owned dwellings destroyed, along with businesses, a school, a
hospital, a public library and a dozen Black churches. Before
buildings were torched and planes were used to drop turpentine bombs
which functioned as incendiary devices, white men and women looted
Black homes and businesses, taking money, pianos, victrolas, jewelry
and clothing, lamps, furniture, etc.

It was the Black working class, the Black poor who suffered the most.
They didn’t have insurance and very, very few had the means to file
suit or make claims.

But in telling the story, we focus solely on “Black Wall Street,”
which made up just a few blocks of the 35-40 square blocks of
Greenwood the mobs destroyed. All we really hear about are doctors and
lawyers and entrepreneurs, Black-owned theaters and the luxurious
Stradford Hotel, when, in fact, _the vast majority of Black Tulsans
beaten, killed and displaced were working people_. Contrary to the
myth of universal prosperity, most Black Tulsans were not getting
rich. Most Black men were laborers — more than one-third employed as
porters, janitors, gardeners, chauffeurs, etc. — and 93 percent of
employed Black women cleaned, cooked and cared for children in white
households. Not everyone rendered homeless owned their homes — many
were, in fact, renters or boarders living in private homes. And many
Black working-class families did manage to purchase property and
construct ramshackle houses out of leftover wood from old barns or
packing crates. No matter what you might have seen on _Watchmen_, in
1921, only six blocks of all of Greenwood were paved, and most Black
working-class houses had outhouses, no underground sewage lines.

But in the discourse surrounding the massacre, it seems like the fate
of those few blocks in and around “Black Wall Street” is all that
matters. Again, Mary E. Jones Parrish set the stage by only including
testimonies from Black elites and by including an illuminating
appendix of a partial list of property losses that lays bare the class
divide in Greenwood. First, the list only includes about 270
Black-owned homes out of a population of about 10,000. Second, only 19
people sustained losses of $15,000 or more, four of whom lost over
$50,000 (J.B. Stradford, $125,000; Lula T. Williams, $85,000; O. W.
Gurley, $65,000; Jim Cherry, $50,000). To be clear, $15,000 in 1921 is
worth over $223,000 in 2021 dollars — though this estimate
doesn’t account for all the factors that determine property values,
like the racial make-up of a neighborhood. Nor am I considering real
wealth since equity varied and many homes were heavily mortgaged.
Black-owned businesses were concentrated on North Greenwood Street as
well as adjoining streets — Frankfort Ave., Cameron, East Archer,
North Elgin, Cincinnati — with more expensive homes situated along
Detroit, which valued between $3,000 and $7,000. But most of the homes
encircling this core area, with exceptions, are valued between $1,500
and $500 — in today’s dollars, between $20,000 and $6,000. And
some of the wealthier Black folks owned between 10 and 20 houses each,
which they rented out for additional income.

We live in such a materialist, celebrity culture that we measure our
“success” by class mobility, by wealth accumulation, and then we
fall victim to a tired narrative that white folks destroyed “our”
communities out of jealousy over of our success. While there is truth
to this, and white looting is clear evidence, the “jealousy” is
cultivated, nurtured in the ideology of white supremacy, usually in
the guise of patriotism and nationalism, or in the capitalist
replacement theory — “N*****s are coming for your jobs!” The mob
was largely made up of shock troops engaged in an attempted land grab
from which they themselves would not directly benefit. The first spark
for the mob wasn’t real estate, but another form of property rooted
in patriarchy — property in women. A Black man accused of assaulting
a white woman is a more effective dog whistle than Negroes with grand
pianos and bank accounts. The second spark, of course, were Negroes
with guns. Here we see Black solidarity and fearlessness on full
display — Black World War I veterans representing all classes within
Greenwood, armed and prepared to defend one of their own, their people
and their property. That act of insubordination, more than anything
else, convinced white folks to fuel up their planes and build an
arsenal.

If we are to be honest, it was the Black working class, the Black poor
who suffered the most. They didn’t have insurance and very, very few
had the means to file suit or make claims (though there is a lesson
here about the relative poverty of Black lawyers whose clients tended
to be Black working people having to deal with a racist criminal
justice system!) We celebrate the resilience of the Black elite
because they were able to hold Greenwood a few decades longer, but we
completely ignore the Black working class, many of whom were displaced
and were never able to return. This is not an oversight, it is
ideological. Again, Parrish acknowledges that the Black elite are
often inclined to “feel their superiority over those less fortunate,
but when a supreme test, like the Tulsa disaster comes, it serves to
remind us that we are all of one race…. Every Negro was accorded the
same treatment, regardless of his education or other advantages. A
Negro was a Negro on that day and was forced to march with his hands
up for blocks.” And yet, she chose to underscore this point with
scripture from 1 Thessalonians 5:14 “Comfort the feeble minded;
support the weak.”

Sadly, when the blockbuster movie comes out about the 1921 massacre,
Greenwood is going to look like Wakanda: wealthy elite Negroes walking
around with shopping bags.

I don’t think the issue of the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 can ever
be fully resolved or “repaired” without addressing Indigenous
dispossession and African slavery.

Finally, any discussion of repair and reparations, of grieving and
mourning the events of 1921 and its aftermath, must grapple with the
colonial violence that made Tulsa or Oklahoma and its settler regime
possible. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court made a significant though
limited ruling that half of Oklahoma is still under Indigenous
jurisdiction — which includes most of Tulsa. Of course, all of the
land is stolen from Indigenous people, including the coveted land upon
which Greenwood sat. Some Black people got to Oklahoma by way of the
forced march of the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees and
Seminoles from the Southeastern territories in the 1830s. Some came as
slaves of wealthy tribal members, others as spouses and children —
part African, part Indigenous. And many died along the way. Later,
Black folks joined the exodus out of the South after the Civil War by
taking advantage of the Homestead Act to acquire land and create
all-Black towns — Oklahoma being a prime destination. But again, on
whose land? There is much rolled up in this process — Native elites
owning African slaves; Africans, slave and free, being incorporated as
members of the five tribes (especially the Creeks and the Seminoles).
I don’t think the issue of the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 can ever
be fully resolved or “repaired” without addressing the question of
both holocausts — Indigenous dispossession and African slavery.
Whatever resolution will be temporary.

I know this is a long answer, but I’m simply making a plea that we
think more deeply about the events of 100 years ago and their legacy
— that we bear in mind that Black working-class lives matter, that
we reject capitalist solutions to address the violence of racial
capitalism and settler colonialism, that we never forget how this
country came to be in the first place, and that we never forget what
“Wall Street” signifies.

AS WE KNOW, THERE HAS BEEN AN ATTACK ON TEACHING CRITICAL RACE THEORY,
WHICH IS NOT SOMEHOW ANTI-WHITE, AND HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH TEACHING
REVERSE RACISM. CRITICAL RACE THEORY ENGAGES THEORY, HISTORY AND
NARRATIVE AS IMPORTANT WAYS OF CRITIQUING THE SO-CALLED RACIAL
NEUTRALITY OF LAW AND EXCAVATES THE SUBTLE WAYS IN WHICH RACISM IS
EMBEDDED WITHIN SOCIAL STRUCTURES AND THE UNCONSCIOUS. IT CRITICALLY
ENGAGES HOW THESE SITES FUNCTION TO MAINTAIN RACIAL INJUSTICE, WHITE
HEGEMONY AND POWER. IN FACT, CRITICAL RACE THEORISTS WOULD BRING
ATTENTION TO THE ANTI-BLACK DYNAMICS OF WHAT TOOK PLACE DURING THE
MASSACRE IN TULSA. ITS AIM IS TO PROVIDE FOR US A CRITICAL FRAMEWORK
FOR UNDERSTANDING THE RACIAL AND RACIST POWER DYNAMICS AT PLAY DURING
THAT TRAGIC PERIOD. YET, EVEN AS WE FOCUS OUR ATTENTION ON THE TULSA
RACE MASSACRE, JOHN KEVEN STITT, THE GOVERNOR OF OKLAHOMA, RECENTLY
SIGNED A BILL THAT PROHIBITS TEACHING CRITICAL RACE THEORY IN SCHOOLS.
THIS IS AN ATTACK ON KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION. IT IS AN ATTACK ON CRITICAL
INQUIRY, AND AN ATTACK ON EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL JUSTICE EFFORTS
TO UNDERSTAND THE SYSTEMIC OPERATIONS OF WHITE SUPREMACY, AND HOW WE
MIGHT CRITICALLY DISMANTLE THE PERPETUATION OF RACIALIZED INJUSTICE.
IN OTHER WORDS, STITT’S EFFORT IS ONE OF PROFOUND BAD FAITH,
PERVASIVE IGNORANCE AND WHITE NATION-BUILDING. HIS REFUSAL
(INTENTIONALLY OR UNINTENTIONALLY) TO FACE THE SYSTEMIC NATURE OF
WHITE RACISM HELPS TO WHITEWASH THE U.S.’S RACIST AND BRUTAL
HISTORY. UNFORTUNATELY, THIS ATTEMPT TO BAN CRITICAL RACE THEORY IS
ALSO OCCURRING IN OTHER REPUBLICAN-CONTROLLED STATES. STITT’S
REFUSAL ATTEMPTS TO REPRESS THE NECESSARY COUNTER-NARRATIVES THAT
CONTEST THE U.S.’S RACIST “INNOCENCE.” THIS RAISES TWO IMPORTANT
ISSUES: THE ATTACK ON “THE 1619 PROJECT” PUBLISHED BY _THE NEW
YORK TIMES_, AND THE CURRENT EXPLOSION OF DISCUSSION OVER NIKOLE
HANNAH-JONES’S TENURE FIGHT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA. WE
ARE ATTACKED FOR OUR SUCCESSES, ATTACKED BECAUSE OF OTHER’S
STEREOTYPES OF US, AND WE ARE ATTACKED FOR HOLDING A DISAGREEABLE
MIRROR UP TO WHITE AMERICA’S FACE. HOW DO YOU CONNECT THE DOTS HERE,
ROBIN?

We have always been attacked for holding up a disagreeable mirror to
white America. But mirrors are not that dangerous because they reflect
back what is only on the surface — the obvious, if unspoken, truth
that we live in a racist country. Conservatives don’t want to hear
it, but liberals, especially in the era of “Equity, Diversity, and
Inclusion” can get with the mirror and even embrace it. For example,
you remember after Obama was elected and Republicans were holding
public readings of the Constitution but skipping over the “arcane”
parts sanctioning slavery as a property right and a basis for
congressional representation and taxation, liberal Democrats were on
their high horse, arguing that we must acknowledge the “offensive”
and “politically uncomfortable” passages of the Constitution, if
only to demonstrate the greatness of the document for rising above the
anachronistic values of the so-called founding fathers.

The problem, of course, is that slavery was not an aberration but
foundational — not only to the American economy but to the very
shape of the Republic. American _liberty_ was built on slavery and
dispossession because liberty was fundamentally about property rights.
A mirror will not show us this, but an ‘X-ray’ will. You see,
liberals hold on to the idea that in the U.S. democracy is a creed
passed down to us via these great documents — this myth, if we’re
to be honest, has driven the liberal wing of the civil rights movement
for decades and still drives it today. This is classic Gunnar Myrdal,
who still lingers like an open sore in the political unconscious of
the Black elite. Myrdal’s main contention is that the “Negro
problem” was an unresolved moral issue for white America: The
conflict is between democratic, egalitarian values of the American
creed and the treatment of Black people. Racist practices, therefore,
are not built into the structure (of settler colonialism, racial
capitalism and patriarchy) but an aberration, a constant disruption to
the structure of (or promise of) American democracy.

1776 was hardly a rupture from the past, but rather a struggle between
fractions of the same class over who would benefit from the spoils of
slavery, slave-produced commerce and Indigenous dispossession.

This kind of obfuscation is visible in the mirror, but not when we use
an X-ray to look at the hidden structure of
our _Herrenvolk_ Republic. Critical race theory (CRT) is one of
those X-rays. It exposes the structure through an “intersectional”
framework of race, class and gender with the intention of
interrogating how power is maintained and inequality reproduced,
despite a liberal legal foundation that promises inclusion and
“equality.” In other words, CRT doesn’t just challenge
right-wing myth-making, but offers a critique of liberalism and the
founding myths of the United States. So why should we be surprised
that the ruling class is trying to eliminate CRT? As you well know,
this is not the first time CRT has been under attack (and here we must
acknowledge the fissures among CRT scholars). In that respect, it
shares much in common with “The 1619 Project.” While “The 1619
Project” does not share CRT’s more robust critique of capitalism,
it succeeded in bringing to a mainstream audience the periodization
that had been _de rigueur_ in U.S. Black Studies for over half a
century, if not longer. By arguing that “America” begins in 1619,
Nikole Hannah-Jones and her fellow contributors show that our
“country” was built on a colonial economy based on racial slavery,
plantation production, trans-Atlantic commodity trade, and the buying,
selling, mortgaging and insuring of human beings. They overturn the
founding myth that America was born out of an anti-colonial war for
liberty against British tyranny. Rather than portray the so-called
founding fathers as the victims of colonial domination, “The 1619
Project” exposes them as part of a long line of colonizers.
Consequently, the essays give the general public greater clarity as to
what 1776 was about — which was hardly a rupture from the past, but
rather a struggle between fractions of the same class over who would
benefit from the spoils of slavery, slave-produced commerce and
Indigenous dispossession.

In short, what we are facing is an ongoing discursive war that began
even before the creation of a Black press. We see it unfold
constantly, the last few years with the fight over Confederate
monuments. Of course, these statues were products of the long
discursive war, introduced mostly during the early 20th century to
signal that the South actually won the Civil War. Indeed, the heyday
for the erection of Confederate statues was around the First World War
and after, the era of the bloody Red Summer of 1919 and the Tulsa race
massacre. The discursive war ramped up with Trump, who announced the
creation of a 1776 Commission (whose vice-chair is the notorious Black
political scientist Carol Swain) to fill the curriculum with
“patriotic education,” in an effort to shield the nation from
Howard Zinn and critical race theorists. And yet, I see all of this as
a desperate regime on the defensive. Their efforts to deny Nikole
Hannah-Jones a tenure-track position is a sign of desperation.
That’s an easy thing to reverse. So, I’m less concerned with
paranoid right-wing white nationalists than I am with (neo)liberal
multiculturalists who side-step the question of power, or what Gerald
Horne wryly calls “left-wing white nationalists” who downplay
white supremacy and mistake a settler-colonial revolt for a democratic
revolution.

IN A PROFOUNDLY COURAGEOUS AND CLEAR STATEMENT BEFORE A HEARING HELD
BY A HOUSE JUDICIARY SUBCOMMITTEE, 107-YEAR-OLD VIOLA FLETCHER, A
BEAUTIFULLY DIGNIFIED BLACK WOMAN, WHO IS A SURVIVOR OF THE 1921 TULSA
RACE MASSACRE, RECALLS, “_I WILL NEVER FORGET THE VIOLENCE OF THE
WHITE MOB WHEN WE LEFT OUR HOME. I STILL SEE BLACK MEN BEING SHOT,
BLACK BODIES LYING IN THE STREET. I STILL SMELL SMOKE AND SEE FIRE. I
STILL SEE BLACK BUSINESSES BEING BURNED. I STILL HEAR AIRPLANES FLYING
OVERHEAD. I HEAR THE_ SCREAMS.” SHE ADDS, “_I HAVE LIVED THROUGH
THE MASSACRE EVERY DAY. OUR COUNTRY MAY FORGET THIS HISTORY BUT I
CANNOT._” VIOLA FLETCHER IS A LIVING WITNESS TO WHITE TERRORISM. IN
CULTURAL THEORIST BELL HOOKS’S ENGAGING ESSAY, “REPRESENTATIONS OF
WHITENESS IN THE BLACK IMAGINATION,” HOOKS WRITES, “ALL BLACK
PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES, IRRESPECTIVE OF THEIR CLASS STATUS OR
POLITICS, LIVE WITH THE POSSIBILITY THAT THEY WILL BE TERRORIZED BY
WHITENESS.” IT IS THIS KIND OF TERRORIZATION OF BLACK PEOPLE THAT
OCCURRED 100 YEARS AGO IN TULSA. IMAGINE THE WEIGHT OF THOSE IMAGES OF
BLACK MEN BEING SHOT BY WHITES, BLACK BODIES LYING IN THE STREETS? TRY
TO IMAGINE NUMEROUS GEORGE FLOYDS LYING DEAD IN THE STREETS. IMAGINE
NOT BEING ABLE TO FREE ONESELF FROM THE SMELL OF SMOKE OR UNSEE THE
FIRE. IMAGINE THE SCREAMS THAT SHE CANNOT CEASE FROM HEARING. WHAT
HAPPENS WHEN SHE HEARS THE SOUND OF A PLANE? SHE SPEAKS SO POWERFULLY
TO OUR CONTEMPORARY MOMENT WHEN SHE SAYS, “_OUR COUNTRY MAY FORGET
THIS HISTORY BUT I CANNOT._” THE COWARDICE ATTACK ON CRITICAL RACE
THEORY AND “THE 1619 PROJECT” ARE WAYS IN WHICH SOME (MANY?) IN
THIS COUNTRY ARE TRYING TO FORGET THIS HISTORY. AS VIOLA FLETCHER
SAYS, THOUGH, “…_ BUT I CANNOT_.” WHEN SHE SAYS “_I
CANNOT_,” I AM BOTH ENCOURAGED AND YET PROFOUNDLY SADDENED.
ENCOURAGED, BECAUSE “I CANNOT” SUGGESTS A REFUSAL TO FORGET.
SADDENED, BECAUSE “I CANNOT” SUGGESTS THE INDELIBLE PAIN OF
ANTI-BLACK TRAUMA. WHAT DO WE SAY TO BLACK PEOPLE WHO HAVE TO LIVE
WITH ANTI-BLACK RACIST TRAUMA ON A DAILY BASIS? I ASK THIS QUESTION
BECAUSE IT THREATENS WHITE AMERICA’S TENDENCY TO FORGET, TO DOWNPLAY
ANTI-BLACK RACISM AND ITS SYSTEMIC STRUCTURE. I ALSO ASK IT BECAUSE,
PERSONALLY, I’M SICK OF THIS SHIT. THERE ARE TIMES WHEN THE IDEA OF
LEAVING THIS COUNTRY FEELS RIGHT. THERE ARE OTHER TIMES WHEN LIVING IS
JUST TOO HARD WHEN YOU KNOW THAT ANTI-BLACK RACISM MAY NOT HAVE AN
END. WE CARRIED THE WEIGHT OF MAINTAINING THE DEMOCRATIC SPIRIT AND
MOMENTUM OF THIS COUNTRY, AND YET WE CONTINUE TO BE MURDERED BY THE
STATE, AND WE STILL CANNOT BREATHE.

These are great and difficult questions. For me, they can be distilled
into three questions: How do we deal with the trauma of anti-Black
racism? What do we remember and how does that shape how we move
forward? Should we continue to carry the burden of “maintaining the
democratic spirit of this country”?

American _liberty_ was built on slavery and dispossession because
liberty was fundamentally about property rights.

With regard to the first question: while in principle I can agree that
all Black people live with the _possibility_ of being terrorized by
whiteness, the possibilities are _differential_ based on class,
gender, age, disability, etc. I am a university professor with a good
income who lives in a neighborhood where the police constantly harass
homeless and underhoused people, almost all of whom are Black men and
women. Or they are constantly hitting up poor Latinx men who line up
in the mornings looking for temporary work. Now, in the 1970s and
‘80s, as a young, poor Black person, my interactions with racist
state and non-state actors (e.g., racist store owners and their
employees), was a daily occurrence. But in my neighborhood now, the
police generally ignore me. Besides, I can also afford to limit my
interactions with police and with the public, and I have documentation
to prove who I am. Does any of this make me completely safe? No. But
to pretend that I don’t enjoy certain privileges that make me less
vulnerable than other Black and Brown folks would be dishonest.

I know this is an uncomfortable topic and I’ve gotten attacked by
folks who believe racism is undifferentiated, and every anti-Black
gesture is equally traumatic. But I deal with quite a number of
middle- and upper-class Black students who are traumatized by
microaggressions of varying degrees. I also teach Black and Brown
students who are transfers from community college, slightly older
students often detoured by a year, 18 months, or two years in prison.
To say that these students are traumatized differently is not to
dismiss the traumas that my more privileged students endure. But as
I’ve written elsewhere, perhaps the best way to deal with trauma
besides therapy is to engage, think and struggle collectively. And
this requires building a solidarity that is not based solely on seeing
the world through personal experience and “affinity,” but to build
political communities around/against the trauma inflicted on most of
the world. Here I’m thinking of war, gender violence, imprisonment,
the neoliberal terrorism of privatization, austerity and
dispossession, often inflicted on the world by the U.S. As Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. put it, “The greatest purveyor of violence in the
world: my own government.”

To the question, _What do we remember and how does it shape how we
move forward?_, I want to return to Tulsa. If we only remember the
loss of property and wealth and the evisceration of a Black elite,
then we only imagine a potential future in which someone like J.B.
Stradford could have been the Black “Hilton,” where the wealthy
are wealthier, and projected “reparations” payments are calculated
based on accumulated property at the time of the violence. Despite
recognizing that the entire community suffered, “compensation”
would be differential, mirroring the very system of racial capitalism
that structured enclosure (segregation), violence, deep inequality and
poverty for most, and premature death. We will also forget what might
be the most impactful response by the community: mutual aid, a caring
culture, and the impulse toward self-defense and protecting one
another. And if our memories begin and end in 1921, we are stripped of
a full accounting of the process of displacement and dispossession —
which begins with the inaugural theft of Indigenous lands and still
hasn’t ended. The story of the massacre continues for decades, with
the disinvestment of Greenwood, the construction of Interstate 244,
urban renewal policies, and more recently a multimillion-dollar museum
commemorating Black Wall Street which many activists see as a Trojan
horse to advance the ongoing movement to gentrify the Greenwood
district.

In the end, we should not have to carry the weight of maintaining the
democratic spirit of this country because it is not a democracy and
never has been. We live in what the late Alexander Saxton and David
Roediger and others described as a _Herrenvolk_ Republic. We have to
exit this country and its liberal humanist conceits, but that
doesn’t necessarily mean to physically leave. (Besides, so long as
the U.S. empire exists, there is nowhere to go!). In
our _Herrenvolk_ Republic, liberalism was founded on a definition of
liberty that places property before human freedom (and human needs),
and an exclusionary definition of the human that permits various forms
of unfree labor, dispossession and subordination based on “race”
and “gender.” And yet, we keep speaking of the Tulsa race massacre
in terms of property, property rights, property destroyed. I think we
need to talk about decolonization in order to advance beyond land as
property toward a vision of freedom not based on ownership or
possession or anthropocentrism. The land has been enslaved and needs
liberation so the Earth could flourish, so people could flourish, so
the historical and contemporary structures of violence might end,
opening up a radically different future. It is worth remembering that
Tulsa was an oil boom town, a fact we are quick to drop uncritically
as further evidence of Black success! But when I speak of exiting this
country, I’m thinking about our solidarity with Indigenous movements
at the forefront of struggles against fracking, pipelines, fossil fuel
extraction, environmental racism, pushing back the climate
catastrophe.

We should not have to carry the weight of maintaining the democratic
spirit of this country because it is not a democracy and never has
been.

GOING FORWARD, I SEE NO END IN SIGHT WHEN BLACK PEOPLE WILL HAVE THEIR
HUMANITY FULLY RECOGNIZED, ESPECIALLY WHEN IT SEEMS THAT
ANTI-BLACKNESS IS FUNDAMENTALLY LINKED TO WHITE AMERICA’S SOCIAL
DNA, ITS UNDERSTANDING OF ITSELF, ITS IDENTITY. JAMES BALDWIN WAS
RIGHT WHERE HE LINKS “THE NEGRO PROBLEM” WITH THE FAILURE OF WHITE
PEOPLE TO TRULY LOVE THEMSELVES. HE WAS ALSO RIGHT WHERE HE
NOTES, “ALL OF US KNOW, WHETHER OR NOT WE ARE ABLE TO ADMIT IT,
THAT MIRRORS CAN ONLY LIE, THAT DEATH BY DROWNING IS ALL THAT AWAITS
ONE THERE.” HOW MIGHT WE DEPLOY HISTORY TO SHATTER THOSE MIRRORS
THAT LIE TO WHITE PEOPLE AND BY EXTENSION FREE THEM
FROM _NEEDING_ US AS A “PROBLEM”?

Obviously, I agree with Baldwin when he writes “mirrors can only
lie.” I think this whole conversation has been an effort to shatter
those mirrors that lie, not only to white folks but to our people as
well. That is the more uncomfortable but much needed discussion to
have. In any case, as I said in the previous response, I don’t think
it is a matter of convincing white folks to
recognize _our_ humanity. The veracity of our humanity was never the
issue — then or now. The problem lies with Western civilization’s
very construction of the human. As Sylvia Wynter, Cedric Robinson,
Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and others have been saying for decades,
the “Negro” was an invention, a fiction — like that of the
“Indian,” the “Oriental,” the “Mexican,” etc. Indeed, the
entire structure of global white supremacy depends on such inventions,
like the fictions of the Arab as non- or anti-Western and the
“Immigrant” as essentially Latinx, or that Indigenous people (in
North America at least) are all dead. I take it, this is what you mean
when you talked about white folks needing us as a “problem.”

These fabrications are enacted through violence. Once they crumble, so
goes the West’s liberal humanism, the massive philosophical
smokescreen that enables racial capitalism to masquerade as the engine
of progress, a pure expression of freedom and liberty, the only path
to human emancipation. The modern world that invented the Negro, the
Oriental, the Indian and the Savage as a means of inventing a
biocentric understanding of the Human (European Man) was built on the
theft of humans, theft of land and water, indiscriminate murder,
violation of customary rights, moral economy, enclosure of the
commons, destruction of the planet — outright lawlessness. And yet,
as Sylvia Wynter, Alexander Weheliye, Saidiya Hartman, and Ariella
Azoulay, among others, remind us, the creators and perpetrators of
this violence were also the inventors of “rights” and citizenship.

Of course, some kind of reparations is an important first step to
begin to come to terms with consequences of settler violence, not just
in Tulsa, but Greensboro and Wilmington, North Carolina; Brownsville;
Rosewood; East St. Louis; Springfield, Illinois; every part of
Mississippi; Watts; Detroit; Newark; Chicago; Sand Creek; Skeleton
Cave; Fort Robinson; Wounded Knee; all along the Southwest border;
Attica; Soledad; San Quentin; Manzanar; the West Bank and Gaza, and
beyond…

Reparations carry their own contradictions, which we can save for
another conversation. Certainly, how we proceed with repair depends on
how we remember. But reparations are easier than decolonization, which
is the answer to the question of where do we go, how to exit. In the
United States, where the structure of colonial domination is
completely shrouded in liberal multiculturalism, neoliberal homilies
about freedom, colorblind discourse that undergirds criminalization
and white supremacy, enabling 400 years of state-sanctioned serial
murder to continue with impunity, power cannot be unseated merely
through violence. (Of course, the very utterance of the word impunity
reveals a contradiction, in that the point of law for the colonized is
not protection but containment, discipline, and in some cases,
genocide.) But we have no choice if we want to save the planet and
free ourselves from liberal humanism. Decolonization, however,
requires the abolition of all forms of oppression and violence. It
means disbanding the military/police, opening borders, opening the
prisons, freeing the body from the constraints of inherited and
imposed normativities of gender and sexuality. It means ending war
entirely, and that means the end of America as we know it.

_This interview has been lightly edited for clarity._

_[George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of philosophy
at Emory University and a Montgomery fellow at Dartmouth College. He
is also the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural fellow in the
Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Program (2019-2020
academic year). He is the author, editor and co-editor of over 20
books, including Black Bodies, White Gazes; Look, A
White; Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in
America; and Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews from an
American Philosopher published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020.]_

_Copyright, Truthout [[link removed]]. Reprinted with
permission. May not be reprinted without permission. _

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