People are obsessed with the story of “Black Wall Street,” otherwise known as the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Other than Watchmen, there are countless conversations about that incident, and the injustice of taking away a thriving socioecosystem that managed to survive without government assistance, as we are often accused of doing. It is unquestionable that the Tulsa riots were atrocious, but there is something that is beginning to be apparent about all of this. Despite what I call the Reign of Terror (1865-1926) during the Reconstruction Era of United States history, people cannot talk about anything but Tulsa.
Whenever there is story that keeps being repeated, one should consider why that story keeps being repeated. Fortunately, the reality of the riots is real, but the problem is that those were far from being the only racial violence during that era. There were countless other independent Black communities that had to endure retaliation for managing without consistent engagement with the government. In the 1990s, there was even a film about Rosewood, an independent Black community in Florida, despite the fiction that Black people benefitted from slavery. More recently, there were two completely fictional movies inspired by independent Black communities. Yet most of the racial history conversations revolve around Tulsa. I think there are two reasons for this.
First and foremost, extracting resources from Black people is a favorite pastime of the dominant narrative and the United States empire. Someone recently raged about how “violent” people were in Nigeria, and then got really quiet when I mentioned that Nigeria had oil. One of the main reasons that people raged against Black communities was because Black people figured out ways to live without interference, dispelling the myth that we were lazy and helpless. Because Tulsa was called “Black Wall Street,” that was a discussion about wealth and the Black community, implying that there could be more resources to extract, and as a threat to the dominant narrative. Thus, people are ecstatic to brag about their knowledge of Tulsa because it indicates Black independence in a way that could mean money for the dominant narrative.
Moreover, people enjoy focusing on Black people as the victims and instigators of violence, but not the white instigation of said violence. The way this story is repeated describes how a thriving community is decimated, but not how it was portrayed in the news, or the people behind the instigation. Consequently, people are not only repeating the Tulsa story to share the scant amount of history they access, but because it is seen as a triumph over Black people who stood their ground. At this point in time, the Tulsa massacre stands as an example of what the dominant narrative thinks should happen to Black people who fail to understand our place in the United States.
If people are truly interested in discovering the truth of Black history, they need to stop chasing the trending topics that are frequently repeated. While I included a link for the Texas Freedom Colonies Project, Texas is only one state, and there were more independent Black communities whose histories were erased because they threatened the dominant narrative. Yes, people should acknowledge that Tulsa happened, but rather than continuing to obsess over one racial atrocity, they should look further into their own local histories. The United States was founded on genocide, which was not even a word until the Jewish Holocaust; it is time to stop treating racial knowledge as something “edgy” to repeat in social settings.
Chasing A Dying Empire 