Today is the 99th anniversary of the infamous Tulsa Race Massacre. On May 31-June 1, 1921, mobs of white people burned Black Wall Street to the ground and an unknown number of black people, at least in the hundreds, were killed. Hundreds more were injured, and thousands were left homeless. The city finally agreed earlier this year to do a “limited search” of a possible mass grave site.
Yesterday was the 93rd anniversary of President Trump’s father’s arrest for participating in a KKK anti-police riot. On Memorial Day, May 30, 1927, Fred Trump was detained “on a charge of refusing to disperse from a parade when ordered to do so.” The parade consisted of “1,000 white-robed Klansmen… eventually spurring an all-out brawl.”
Thinking of these today, and so many many many other riots on other days throughout the year, when white people violently subjugated their fellow citizens of color in this country:
Ole Miss 1962, Southern segregationists literally battled US marshals over the admission of a Black student.
In 1945 right here in LA, whites blew up the home of a Black family that had recently moved into a “white” area.
In 1976 in my hometown of Boston, whites rioted against school integration; there’s an infamous photo of a white man trying to use an American flag on a flagpole to stab a Black man during that incident.
This didn’t start with George Floyd.
This didn’t start with protestors refusing to disperse or with “rioters” or “looters” damaging property in Minneapolis or any of our nation’s cities tonight.
It started with centuries of violent white supremacy in which Black people were treated as property themselves – their lives literally stolen, their labor extracted for generations – and a subsequent century and a half in which that violent subjugation and economic extraction have continued through different means.
And let’s not forget this either: every inch of every protest is taking place on land stolen by our government over centuries through genocide. That’s not ancient history either; US government policy has continued to strip treaty lands and rights from Native nations into my lifetime.
My fellow white people. Be very, very careful how you criticize this uprising. I am not shaming you; I only learned these things over the past few years myself, and I will never catch up. I will never truly know what damn near every person of color in this country knows from childhood on.
If you’re saying “nothing justifies this”? You are absolutely right. Nothing can ever justify the violence that Black people have endured in this country. Nothing can justify us now in pretending that the fire started this weekend.