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2.19.2005
FT.com / Home UK - Burnt offerings: "When martial law finally brought quiet, 35 blocks of Tulsa's north side - with 1,256 houses and 23 churches - had burned to the ground. Hundreds of homes and shops had been looted. Black men had been shot, burned and dragged through the streets." I'm a little late to this, first reading about it at Tom Coburn is a Big Fat Jerk who linked to it from Crooked Timber. I've lived in Tulsa most of my life, with only a couple years missing where I lived in Texas. I heard little about the race riots for most of my life. It has been swept under the rug for the most part. There is a side of me that feels that history should be given its peace but I also feel its incredibly important that we acknowledge what went wrong in our past so that we can clearly see the warnings signs should we ever start down that path again. You know... demonizing others, cultivating a culture of resentment and hatred? In Tulsa you have a few options available to you. You can either leave, which many of the brightest and most talented do; you can adopt the mindset that everything is a-ok even as the city is still horribly divided along racial lines; or you can be aware, acknowledge, and learn about why things are they way they are and try to change them. While its important to talk about race, and its still an important topic here in the United States, I think that if we focus on race as the driving motivation behind the violence of the past then we will miss the greater lessons that we so desperately need to learn: One group of people, who feel like they are deserving of the privilege they enjoy, either because of their own self-perceived sense of moral, racial, ethnic, national or idealogical superiority, will upon sensing their loss of privilege, latch onto the "other" as the source of their strife, and see violence as an appropriate "solution" to their "suffereing". Race is just one convenient faultline, one of the easiest to use because of the clearly visable divisions. But next time it could just as easily be some other point of tribal division. Its not always going to be Aryans vs. Jews, or Shirts vs. Skins, or Catholics vs. Protestants, or Blacks vs. Whites. In every instance its Us vs. Them with humans on both sides using tribal hatred to fight what is usually a fight over resources. |
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