Tulsa, Rosewood, and How the Racist Lies Get a Pass

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

This weekend was the anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, one of the most horrifying episodes of organized violence against African-Americans after emancipation.

Linda Christensen, a high school teacher in Portland, has some excellent thoughts on the importance of this event and the potentials of teaching it, especially to her group of mostly African-American students.

SNIP

For most of you, I don’t need to make the case why history is important, but I do get not infrequent comments from random people here on the irrelevancy of studying the past. The work I do on the history of organized labor and environmental history has important implications of understanding these issues in the present; in fact, I’d argue that an argument about what to do going into the future about the present without a grounding in the past is an argument likely to fail. Similarly, not understanding the history of discrimination and violence toward people of color in our nation founded on white supremacy allows people to blame current inequality on people’s laziness, bad morals, or racial characteristics.

I think it's even more important to teach the Tulsa Race Riot to white students. I never heard of the Tulsa Race Riot, or the Rosewood Massacre until I was an adult. And Erik is dead-on: without the facts of how American white have always treated minorities (Friday was the anniversary of the United States declaring Native Americans to be citizens - in 1924), racists and conservatards and freakazoids get away with blaming the victims.