Learning about Tulsa, almost a decade ago, shook me to my core. It caused me to take a good solid look at myself, and my political leanings at the time.
Learn about the history of this country before you judge what has been going on.
Learn about Tulsa,OK; about Rosewood, FL; about post civil war Wilmington, NC.
We tell the black community to “be moral”, “work hard”, “own your own house, business”, “obey the law” and when they have – the white community has bombed them, lynched them, set fire to their churches with their children in them and tried to eradicate the forward movement and betterment of the black community by red lining communities and making home loans more difficult to obtain.
We need to take a look at why the black community has so many problems. And I am going to say it out loud, it is the WHITE community at its origin.
The argument is made about strong families: how can the black community have strong families when they were shown that their families aren’t important for the first 400 years they were in this land? Slave brokers and owners frequently broke up family units. Yet we tout the importance of families for a healthy society. Then there are groups who have targeted black families in other ways, forced sterilization, syphilis experiments, eugenics based reasons to target the black community as undesirable and that barely gets us to the Civil Rights movement and desegregation.
The notion that black men are thugs, perpetually angry or behaving criminally. Usually for no other reason than the color of their skin. Many black defendants receive higher sentences as shown in Florida. But more over blacks are stopped for ‘suspicious’ behavior, by even being in their own homes .
We tell them to ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’ and when they do, we do whatever we can to pull them down and destroy what they built. We did it in NYC see Seneca Village where we decided Central Park was more important than a prospering, safe black township. How about Wilmington, NC where blacks were murdered because they were elected to office, over 2000 whites participated in a coup d’état of the legitimately elected government. Tulsa, Ok: A long standing animosity between the white and black communities ignited on an allegation of a black man assaulting a white woman – for this an entire community was wiped out by fire and 36 people died though that number is thought to be too low today. These are just a few
We have lynched, burned, and terrorized the black community since 1565 if you include the Spanish colonies, 1619 if you only consider Jamestown. And we expect them to “get over it” when school desegregation only happened in 1955. This was 65 years ago when legally the Supreme Court handed down their decision in Brown v. Board of Education. However we still occasionally hear about white only proms, racial discrimination in Greek organizations in colleges and other incidents that can be easily googled. Schools, streets, military bases, etc. are named after confederate generals and plantation owners – icons of slavery and brutality. Imagine a Jew having to go to a school named after Himmler.
We expect them to “get over it” when the black community is forced to see the vestiges of Jim Crow every time they look around their cities where there are confederate statues, plantations used as wedding venues where slavery is glossed over if not presented with rose colored glasses, and the confederate battle flag is accepted as “southern pride” or “heritage” where for the black community its a reminder of over 450 years of brutality, degradation and dehumanization.
And yet we cry “never forget” about 9/11.
How do we “fix it”: We don’t. We give them the tools to fix it themselves. We stop over policing/patrolling black neighborhoods we afford black defendants the same determination as white defendants for the same crimes and fines and then we LET THEM “fix” their own communities after leveling the playing field in Education, business and home loans, etc. We stop making school funding be based on property taxes and instead even the funding playing field.
I don’t have the answers but I empathize with the black community and my heart breaks on your behalf.