U.S. propaganda media are referring to the utter destruction of the entire African-American community of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921 as a "race riot." This is deceptive.
A riot is a spontaneous outburst of mob violence. A pogrom is an organized, pre-planned attack on a minority community that is already oppressed.
Pogrom's are organized by government authorities, who employ mobs along with police and in the case of Tsarist Russia, soldiers, to carry out a mass terrorist attack on a besieged community.
What happened in Tulsa in 1921 was organized by the local power structure. The town newspaper incited the attack. The local government, including the police, aided and abetted it. (No one can deny they did zero to stop it.) The assault lasted two days and a night, May 31 and June 1. 35 square city blocks were destroyed. (The Washington Post says 45.) Where was the Governor? Where was the President? Where were the state police, the National Guard, the U.S. Army?
The white racists of Tulsa looted the homes and businesses of the African-American citizens before razing the entire neighborhood of Greenwood. An estimated 300 African-Americans were murdered. A plane was used in an aerial bombardment of the area. In the aftermath, no criminal charges were ever brought for the thousands of felonies, including murders, that were committed. That fact alone proves official approval. No compensation has ever been paid.
Now, thanks to various social activists and writers and a handful of historians making noise about this buried crimes for a number of years, the U.S. power establishment has jumped to the head of the march. The propaganda system is suddenly reporting something it kept hidden for years Even the president of the U.S. has gotten into the act, declaring one of the two dates of the pogrom a "day of remembrance,." Wringing its hands, the power establishment feigns sympathy, distancing itself from a crime it managed to keep "secret" for a hundred years. Now "the" media is acting like it didn't hide the fact of the pogrom for a century. The establishment's propaganda system has assiduously avoided mentioning that this major historical event is kept secret from students, who are never told of it, nor is it mentioned in their textbooks. The propagandists also conveniently neglect to mention that not a dime of compensation has ever been paid for the wanton looting and destruction. Nor is any mention made of making actual amends for the crime- which is why we are on safe ground saying that the sympathy is feigned. [1]
By waiting a century to even admit the existence of this event, the system has outlasted all but three of the victims - only one, who was 7 years old at the time, with any useful memory of the event- of the largest incident of violent racial oppression in U.S. history. (At least, the largest we know about. Who knows what else has been hidden all these years?)
Oppression is the key word here. The "madness" had a logic. It was not merely an emotional explosion of hate that made no sense. The black community of Greenwood was prosperous. It's residents were independent and successful. It's very existence constituted a threat to the white supremacist social order in two ways. First, the visible economic success of the blacks put the lie to the foundational myth of white supremacy, that "whites" are inherently superior to "blacks," who are an innately inferior species of being. Second, throughout U.S. history, including to the present day, white prosperity depends in part on the ability to economically exploit blacks, starting with the hyper-exploitation of slavery. The ability to exploit by keeping people in menial jobs at low pay and no benefits requires that the victims have no other options, and are not independent. Thus Greenwood NEEDED to be destroyed as an economic imperative. [2]
Again, the establishment power structure is on the job, making sure people don't understand this by not mentioning any of it.
Oklahoma is a major oil producing state. It is also one of the most reactionary states in the U.S. If the "whites" there think it's "unfair' that they "should have to pay for something they didn't do," (I guess it's fairer to rob and murder black people and not compensate them) then let them levy a special tax on the oil industry there and pay the descendants decent money. Throughout U.S. history every effort has been made to keep "blacks" impoverished, to impede their economic advancement in every way possible. Not just he obvious ways like job discrimination, which can be blamed on individual bigotry, hiding the role of institutional racism (which the Republicans deny exist!, including, most disgustingly, the black opportunist Tim Scott, GOP Senator from South Carolina) ) [3]
The failure to face reality honestly in the case of the 1921 Tulsa pogrom has a parallel in the failure to face reality in the January 6 coup attempt earlier this year. The attempt by Donald J. Trump to remain in office by a blatant seizure of power is being called a "riot," or sometimes an "insurrection," when was plainly on its face a failed coup. The whole point of storming the Capitol was to stop the certification of Biden as the winner of the November 2020 presidential election. This was explicit. Trump himself personally instigated the mob invasion of the Capitol just minutes before the mob swarmed the building. Trump even named specific individuals as targets, including his own vice president, Michael Pence. Yet Democrats and media figures say there is a need to investigate "to find out what happened." You really don't now what happened? That is a radical denial of reality.
An unhealthy person is one who cannot face reality. Likewise an unhealthy country is also.
Greenwood neighborhood set ablaze, May 31, 1921.
The organized mob did its work well.
Black Wall Street Gallery, New York City. At least they didn't burn it down. One or a few creeps acting under cover of darkness lacked the nerve to do that.
1] However some of our "sick white brothers" as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. referred to them in a speech shortly before they murdered him, aren't even feigning sympathy. On the contrary, they are taking the occasion to forcibly assert white supremacy. The "Black Wall Street Gallery" in the neighborhood of Soho in Manhattan was defaced on the "day of remembrance," its sign obliterated with WHITE paint, the message being "We Erase You!" The obliterated neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa was referred to at the time as "the black Wall Street." No doubt that was yet another provocation which the white supremacists of the era found intolerably insulting to their unwarranted sense of superiority. In fact, like Nazis, they are inferior to normal human beings.
2] Entire books and studies have been written about the systematic economic repression of African-Americans post slavery. Starting with the failure to make good on the promise of "40 acres and a mule" to give freed slaves an economic stake, instead consigning them to the neo-slavery of forced prison labor and peonage of sharecropping, on through the insistence of Southern Democrats in Congress that New Deal programs like the minimum wage and Social Security be designed to exclude farm laborers and house maids- i.e. blacks- to the racist covenants in home deeds barring sales to blacks, to discriminatory Federal housing policies, redlining by banks, the refusal of the Agriculture Department to provide black farmers with access to aid programs they were entitled to, virtually wiping out American black farmers as a class, to the organized assault on black homeowners by mortgage fraudsters- the list is practically endless, and entire books have been written about each specific example. But one must step back from scrutinizing individual trees to perceive the forest of racist oppression as a whole. American white racists even went so far as to deliberately build highways through black inner city neighborhoods, using "urban renewal" as an excuse to wipe them out and scatter their inhabitants to the winds. Probably the worst of these culprits was Robert Moses, an unelected infrastructure "czar" whom the venal politicians of New York State empowered to rampage through poor neighborhoods in this fashion, not only destroying communities, tearing to shreds the social fabric of the people living there, but bringing in more polluting motor vehicles to cause disease and death. Moses was such an awful racist that he ordered bridge overpasses on the highway leading to Jones Beach to be made too low for buses to pass below them. He wanted to make sure that poor black and Hispanic families without cars couldn't go to the each. This humanoid piece of excrement was so evil he went out of his way to prevent children who were the wrong "color" from enjoying the seashore and the ocean. How loathsome can you get? And how despicable is a political system that empowers such as this creature? Robert Caro wrote a detailed book on Moses' numerous crimes against humanity, although the book is flawed by a lack of appropriate moral outrage. Caro was fascinated by the nature of power, and how Moses managed to acquire it.
Lest you think such gratuitously racist attitudes such as Moses' are a thing of the past, it wasn't long ago when shrewish rightwing propagandist Megyn Kelly shouted at her TV audience that "SANTA CLAUS IS WHITE!," just to try and make "black" children feel inferior and left out. Santa Claus of course is an IMAGINARY BEING and thus CAN BE ANY "COLOR" ANYONE WANTS HIM TO BE, you loathsome racist bitch!
3] No surprise, after I wrote this [but before posting, as I was still editing], the Republican mayor of Tulsa said it wouldn't be "fair" to make "taxpayers" (presumably only "whites" pay taxes in Oklahoma!) pay for something "criminals" did long ago. Sooo predictable! In fact, I predicted it!
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