The ‘You Will Not Replace Us’ Attack on Black History
Walking a Mile in Somebody Else’s Shoes Is Now Apparently a Marxist Plot
One hundred years ago this week white residents, many of them deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked Black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Over the course of sixteen hours, almost every significant building in what came to be called Black Wall Street was burned to the ground. Police detained and arrested 6,000 of the 10,000 African Americans who lived in the district. 9,000 were left homeless. Thirty-five city blocks of 1,256 residences were razed.
Once the ashes cooled and the dead were buried the racial violence continued. Tulsa’s white leaders worked to keep Greenwood from being rebuilt by passing ordinances to prevent homes from being rebuilt in the district. Nobody was ever prosecuted for the attack.
https://twitter.com/joshua_miner/status/1398989849189703680?s=20
What happened in Tulsa was far from being an outlier. It’s estimated that there were upwards of 100 massacres that took place between the end of the Civil War and the 1940s. And they took place throughout the nation.
CNN’s History Refocused has a rundown with photos and historical accounts of some of those horrible events. It’s worth a look.
Oklahoma and other states around the country aren’t finished hiding these ugly parts of US history. Legislation seeking to limit how teachers talk about race has been considered by at least 15 states, according to an analysis by Education Week.
As Republican lawmakers across the country are advancing bills limiting how public school teachers can discuss race in their classrooms, educators say the efforts are already having a chilling effect on their lessons.
Melissa Smith, an adjunct professor at Oklahoma City Community College, was supposed to teach a class this summer on race and ethnicity. It’s been put on “pause” thanks to HB/SB 1775, a law banning discussions of white privilege, from required courses in Oklahoma.
From the Washington Post:
“Our history of the United States is uncomfortable and it should make us uncomfortable and we should grow from that,” Smith said in an interview Friday. “And I tell my kids all the time, get comfortable being uncomfortable. And if I don’t make you uncomfortable in class then I’m not doing my job.”
“I don’t know any professors or teachers who teach that one race is superior to another,” she added. “We teach that … one race and one sex have privileges and that there are, again, inequalities that we need to address.”
Teaching on race and racism is a fiercely partisan issue, with the academic lens of “critical race theory” becoming a catchall term and a flash point for broader culture wars. The theory, which dates back to the 1970s, holds that racism is systemic and embedded in policies rather than just perpetuated by bigoted people, creating barriers for people of color in myriad spheres of life.
https://twitter.com/KevinLevin/status/1397355683767595015?s=20
At the core of this move by the right is the repudiating the very idea of racism being a systemic problem.
This allows them to claim voter suppression laws are fair, that police shootings of Black people are somehow justified, and the belief systems of the losing side in the Civil War are valid.
Why are they doing this?
To keep their shock troops motivated. This is the underlying motivation for the January 6th assault on the US Capitol.
From the New York Times:
When the political scientist Robert Pape began studying the issues that motivated the 380 or so people arrested in connection with the attack against the Capitol on Jan. 6, he expected to find that the rioters were driven to violence by the lingering effects of the 2008 Great Recession.
But instead he found something very different: Most of the people who took part in the assault came from places, his polling and demographic data showed, that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.
From an article written by Pape for the Washington Post:
CPOST also conducted two independent surveys in February and March, including a National Opinion Research Council survey, to help understand the roots of this rage. One driver overwhelmingly stood out: fear of the “Great Replacement.” Great Replacement theory has achieved iconic status with white nationalists and holds that minorities are progressively replacing White populations due to mass immigration policies and low birthrates. Extensive social media exposure is the second-biggest driver of this view, our surveys found. Replacement theory might help explain why such a high percentage of the rioters hail from counties with fast-rising, non-White populations.
By fostering fear of the “other” the right seeks to keep its base motivated enough to take action, whether it’s voting in off-year elections, silencing educators, or individual acts of terror.
The idea is to make terms like Critical Race Theory so repugnant to certain parts of the population that any time they are presented with information going against their long-held belief systems, it will be simply dismissed as part of a larger plot against white people.
The Guardian’s article, The fight to whitewash US history; ‘a drop of poison is all you need’ goes into this topic in depth, including an interview with Adam Laats, a Binghamton University professor who studies the history of education in the US:
Still, the fact that reactionaries are looking to legislate against certain ideas may be a sign of just how weak their own position is.
Laats suspects that the right is using “critical race theory” as a euphemism. “You can’t go to a school board and say you want to ban the idea that Black Lives Matter.
“They’ve given up on arguing in favor of indoctrination and instead say that critical race theory is the actual indoctrination,” he said of the conservative movement. “They’ve given up on arguing in favor of racism to say that critical race theory is the real racism. This campaign against the teaching of critical race theory is scary, and it’s a sign of great strength, but it’s strength in favor of an idea that’s already lost.”
I would argue that trying to reason with the proponents of these backwards ideas is a waste of time, kinda like, as journalism professor Christian Christensen says (in another context), “It’s like trying to debate quantum mechanics with your dog.”
What’s important here is making sure that the truths of US history and systemic racism are shared early and often with those who haven’t already hidden behind their intellectual barricades.
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Flashback…
https://twitter.com/keithboykin/status/1398991267833466886?s=20
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