This massacre is proof that we must address racism socially. It simply doesn't work to say "Well, who cares that some whites are racist? Just go do your thing and work to be successful and ignore it."
They did that and the result was their stuff was burned to the ground. Afterwards, white people in power tried to pass more stringent building codes nominally on the theory that "They burned to the ground because they weren't built very well." completely ignoring the role that actively hostile racism played.
It didn't "just burn to the ground" due to some accident. It was torched by an invading force.
And that invading force then tried to change the building codes to prevent it from being rebuilt while pretending "it's for your own good -- your stuff burned to the ground because you losers didn't build it well enough."
The same applies to a lot of social justice issues. To some degree, it's helpful to just focus on building your own dream, but there are some very real issues where that's really not sufficient because other people will actively seek to destroy your dream and/or you because of who you are.
This needs to change. This unfortunate truth needs to be something much more in the past than it really is. (There are people who like to claim it is in the past. It's really not and such claims are part of the problem.)
"We need to build an interstate highway system, to modernize our logistical capacity and connect our commercial centers. But we need land in those cities, and all the prime real estate is developed."
"Hmmmm...we could eminent domain some of the land."
"But from whom? A lot of those commercial centers are owned by white people!"
"How about the equally affluent Black neighborhoods in those cities? Let's just bulldoze those, wiping out generational wealth that took them decades to build, and permanently dividing them off from their cities' downtowns, making it next to impossible to share in the prosperity the new infrastructure will bring with it!"
"Brilliant! Smith, you're a genius!"
It's not always as obvious as firebombing and massacres. Those are the exceptions. It's usually much more insidious and subtle than that.
I don't disagree with anything you said in your original comment. I was adding additional commentary that systemic racism isn't always overt acts of violent destruction. Many times it's subtle acts of state-sponsored legal maneuvering using the excuse of "for the greater good."
The problem is your comment is unnecessarily inflammatory and accusatory. Often, the unfortunate outcomes you describe aren't due to overt willful interest in actively destroying the assets of people of color. It's very often even more insidious and subtle than that and to some degree grows out of blind spots rather than willful destruction.
My remark is not an exaggeration. One* cannot claim this massacre was some unfortunate oversight.
Those distinctions need to be made for two reasons:
1. It is important to make it crystal clear that racism absolutely involves malice and isn't simply a case of "Well, we didn't realize it was impacting people that way or we surely would have done something else because we are good-hearted people."
2. In cases where it does involve some degree of obliviousness, this must be acknowledged because in cases where people are just blindly going along with historical patterns and genuinely don't wish to harm anyone, educating them that people are, in fact, harmed even if you didn't intend to do harm is the best remedy.
Both points are essential information for finding a path forward. Taking only one of those points and overgeneralizing it actively undermines efforts to find real solutions.
* Changed "you" to one" for the sake of clarity. Apologies for the confusion.
In no way did I claim the massacre was an unfortunate oversight.
In the case of the Interstate Highway System, it was legitimately the stated idea to go through Black neighborhoods because those were considered less desirable than white ones, and the land could be had for cheaper. It was absolutely malicious. In several documented cases, the routes were originally supposed to go through white neighborhoods until they complained, and the highways were rerouted through Black neighborhoods (who also complained, but were ignored.)
And the federal program became a model for state and local programs that did the same thing. Great example is NC 147, which destroyed the prosperous Hayti neighborhood of Durham, NC, and wiped out the city's own Black Wall Street. And it was absolutely done intentionally.
Before life got in the way, I wanted to be an urban planner. So I'm familiar with such patterns.
But the very fact that in several documented cases, the initial proposed route went through a white neighborhood disproves your position that it was intentionally done to destroy black wealth as some kind of malice aforethought master plan.
It happened because the white neighborhood was able to defend itself and the black neighborhood was not. There's absolutely an element of racism there, but that racism is not as blunt as "unbridled malice aforethought."
I want real solutions. You don't find them by inflating accusations because you are justifiably angry about the outcome.
I want real solutions and I think I know something about getting real results. Inflating the amount of active and intentional malice aforethought involved is generally counterproductive.
You seem to be claiming that, in general, the destruction of Black neighborhoods for the interstate did not have racist “malice aforethought”. That it was more of a case of white neighborhoods being able to defend themselves ... but not a maliciously-chosen routing in the first place.
I think your claim here is more false than true.
This is a pretty well-known story in American history, as you point out. Most people who spend time in major American cities know of some very specific examples where one or more Black neighborhoods were torn down or split to put a freeway through. These choices were made deliberately.
“The highway construction process was essentially used by some planners both as a step towards enhanced national infrastructure and connectivity, as well as a tool to achieve discriminatory objectives along the lines of race and class.”
Please note the focus on deliberate intent in the last clause.
I'm not denying there was deliberate intent in some cases. But your own quote says "some planners" not "all planners."
Some planners were intentionally pursuing an explicitly racist and classist agenda. And some were just doing what other planners did because "monkey see, monkey do" and some were just trying to do their job and get their paycheck and make their own lives work.
Planners don't always have the kind of god-like powers to rearrange the city as they see fit that outsiders seem to routinely imagine them having. There is often a political process involved and planners themselves are frequently tearing their hair out about their own inability to do as they please.
I've had conversations where people characterized large swaths of single family detached homes -- aka the modern suburb -- as "racist architecture" and I tried to say "I don't think that is helpful framing. I think to some degree, we made large swaths of single family detached homes because greenfield development was expedient and not because single family detached homes are, per se, racist architecture."
And someone was upset and trying to tell me I was denying racism or something and I finally said "Let me put it this way: I'm sure they would have found ways to keep out people of color even if they had been building condos in towers in the downtown area. Racism is a social phenomenon and should not be conflated with a particular form of architecture."
That's very similar to what I am trying to say here. If that's still not clear, I think I need to just let people be confused. I don't know how I can more clearly state my meaning.
> Afterwards, white people in power tried to pass more stringent building codes nominally on the theory that "They burned to the ground because they weren't built very well."
There is no theory. That's literally how the entire world's building codes work. You have regrettable accidents that are deemed avoidable, and thus to ensure they don't happen again you pass building code legislation that stops people from making the same mistakes over and over again.
I mean, even the grenfell tower fire triggered building code changes, and that was hardly caused by racism. Every time there is a major accident regulatory bodies scramble to check if anything should be done to avoid further accidents due to the same root cause. Why should this particular case be interpreted any differently?
I’m not sure that Tulsa fits many definitions of ‘regrettable accident’ and Grenfell seems to have happened because regulation wasn’t followed, not because regulation was inadequate.
Stating that residential buildings should not allow fire to spread is literally one of the most basic targets of building code legislation.
There are more building code legislation focused directly or indirectly on avoiding or mitigating residential fires than to address earthquakes.
Building code legislation targeting residential fires touch all aspects of building codes, from minimum thickness of concrete structure cover and cladding of steel elements, corridor and door widths, construction material properties, and even design principles that address how much time can residents stay indoors while a fire ravages outside their doors.
Hell, even urban water supplies are designed specifically with fire fighting in mind.
And here you are, complaining that a massive fire that led to the loss of life triggered legislation changes aimed at stopping this very same barbaric attack from happening, not due to how the whole world's building regulation works and has always worked but... Racism?
The point is that whenever high-impact accidents happen, regulation follows. Even the Grenfell Towers fire triggered regulatory changes, because the whole point of regulation is to address root causes. That's how building codes work.
> Many of the victims from the area, also called Black Wall Street, are thought to have been buried in mass graves, but there are few recordds that exist from the massacre or the burials.
Just in case your first exposure was from a different source, people started saying "black lives matter" because of the instances where people acted callously or apathetic towards the lives of black people, and the centuries of history in the Americas that are congruent with and reinforce that reality continuing now.
It has since been assigned to a faction and movement that has very little to do with the point of why people are saying it.
Hope that helps someone! There are a lot of people that think this came out of the blue and interpret the chants as an impending pogrom putting some people's lives above others, but that is a distortion that is furthest from the truth.
> There are a lot of people that think this came out of the blue and interpret the chants as an impending pogrom putting some people's lives above others, but that is a distortion that is furthest from the truth.
Indeed. There's a lot of knee-jerk reaction against Black Lives Matter, and an eagerness to establish who the leaders are so it and everyone involved can be discredited. However, it's not an organization, it's a movement. Do you think the lives of black people matter? Then you're part of Black Lives Matter.
And, it is important to note, saying "black lives matter" emphatically does NOT mean that you think that non-black lives don't matter. But the sad fact of the matter is that historically black lives have often not mattered as much as non-black lives, and sometimes (perhaps even often) still don't even today. That's the reason for the emphasis being placed where it is.
And the rest of the world, where colonialist policies have left a historical legacy of disenfranchisement among less-favored groups, often along color lines.
> Do you think the lives of black people matter? Then you're part of Black Lives Matter.
Do you think it's okay to be white? Then you are a white nationalist, too [0].
Basically you are insisting that we should interpret the movement at the face-value of its name, and that's it. Are you willing to apply the same standards to other movements? Do "All Lives Matter"? Do "Blue Lives Matter"?
Perhaps you're getting down voted for pointing out that the BLM organization is different than the sentiment that yes, black lives matter. I've found you can't criticize the BLM organization or else it's equated that you think black lives do not matter.
There were a lot of people during the civil rights era who were upset that they couldn't criticize Martin Luther King or it would be equated as being against equal rights.
Maybe the problem is that you're overly concerned with how you can safely criticize the movement. Do you personally think black lives matter? Have you spent as much time criticizing the problems that created the movement as you have spent criticizing the movement itself?
As somebody with a cursory interest in communist movements across the centuries, I’d be curious to know how BLM leaders are “communists”. Do they advocate for collective ownership of the means of production?
> I’d be curious to know how BLM leaders are “communists”.
One possible explanation:
Patrisse Cullors specifically has credited Marx, Lenin, and other Communist figures as ideological inspiration (which isn't the same thing as being a Communist, to be sure.)
I think it was also Cullors who made a comment about herself and one of the other founders (Alicia Garza, I think) being “trained Marxists” in, as I recall, the context of explaining some of their strategic/orgabizing approaches, not ideological goals.
Exactly. It’s an organization with a website, a donation page, and a published set of beliefs on that website, but I can’t seem to say anything about it that isn’t emphatic agreement without getting back loaded questions about how how racist I might be. When Fortune 500 companies are donating to the cause and its brand imagery is showing up everywhere from video games to github, then we have a right to critique it without fearing social ostracism.
> > and the centuries of history in the Americas that are congruent with and reinforce that reality continuing now.
> That reality isn’t continuing now.
The list you entirely misrepresent says:
“Although half of the people shot and killed by police are White, Black Americans are shot at a disproportionate rate. They account for less than 13 percent of the U.S. population, but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of White Americans.”
If you look at the actual shootings, it's a bunch of tales of people engaging in mortal combat with the police. You might think, oh, police are still reacting more violently in similar situations. But we can check for that: In the past decade, police have been feloniously killed by black criminals at 3.7 times the rate of other demographics (199 out of 535, iirc, see the Law Enforcement Officers Feloniously Killed section of the Uniform Crime Report, Table 42). If black guys were fighting police at the same rate as other groups, you'd expect a much much lower number.
What you might still have an argument for is that police could do a better job overall of not killing people. I mean, I would make that argument, in specific ways.
You can't assess racism in the criminal justice system if you start by assuming that there is no racism in the criminal justice system’s determination of who is committing crimes.
In reality, almost all of the people killing cops are committing crimes.
In fact, the statistic for felonious killings of LEO doesn't even require specifying the exact perp -- it's just the race of the perp. One category is "unknown race."
I should add, the biggest hole in your comment is this notion that they're not only convicting the wrong guy, they're getting the wrong race and that's throwing off the numbers (by a factor of 3? Or 8, depending on crime?) As if the victim's getting attacked by a white guy and she's saying a black guy did it, to the point of a 3x crime rate. And the security cameras got the color wrong, too.
It's like you're imagining this great holocaust of white assault victims suffering from having the wrong guy prosecuted for attacking them, with half the perps getting replaced by some random black guy.
The car accident comparison has got to stop. It is meaningless. What point do you think that reference helps to clarify? I ask that curiously, not hostilely. I fail to understand how it is helpful to compare the number of people shot and killed un/necessarily by police officers to those killed in car crashes. It seems like the goal is to attempt to diminish the severity of the problem of police killing people by finding a bigger number of people dying to a different cause... which is just silly. The two are not comparable problems and each requires completely different solutions. I think a helpful comparison is examining how in other first world countries the police kill almost nobody. Per capita, more people are killed by law enforcement in the US than in any other 1st world country by a huge margin.
> The car accident comparison has got to stop. It is meaningless. What point do you think that reference helps to clarify? I ask that curiously, not hostilely. I fail to understand how it is helpful to compare the number of people shot and killed un/necessarily by police officers to those killed in car crashes. It seems like the goal is to attempt to diminish the severity of the problem of police killing people by finding a bigger number of people dying to a different cause... which is just silly.
The reference is to allow for comparison. Most people have no feeling for absolute statistics. Comparing something in relative terms to the numbers for something with which they have a daily experience, helps to provide context for the scale or severity of a problem.
> The two are not comparable problems and each requires completely different solutions.
Nobody said they require the same solution. The point is to grasp the scale of the problem.
> I think a helpful comparison is examining how in other first world countries the police kill almost nobody. Per capita, more people are killed by law enforcement in the US than in any other 1st world country by a huge margin.
In 2019 that was 28 people (9 black, 19 white). Again, that's in a country of 330,000,000 people. Yes, it is disproportionately black vs the general population. But there are other factors like income and housing density that come into play. And in absolute terms it's a very small number of the total population.
Yes, we should be reducing that further but it's not a problem of police randomly killing blacks. And it's nowhere near the scale of other problems that are killing people or blacks specifically. Last year in Chicago alone, there were 349 black homicides.
This is such a bullshit argument, "Why, only a small percentage of police interactions end with a shooting, and most of them are armed!" And you link to a conservatives opinion piece, which isn't biased at all.
US police kill 33.5 people per 10M, which is nearly 3x our closest neighbor (who has imported our policing strategies, unfortunately).
One would expect the rate of police killings to be proportional to the homicide rate, since that is what is supposed to drive dangerous police encounters. Looking at police kills per 10M, divided by the homicide rate per 100k:
So 41% less than the rate of Australia, 21% more than Canada and Sweden, 67% more than Norway, and 73% more than the Netherlands. Not great, but not terrible.
I fail to understand how this has to do with anything. There are considerably more people driving cars than interacting with the police, probably more than 10000x. Which means, you're statistically more likely to be killed by police than in a car.
No other developed "1st world" country even comes close to the number of deaths per capita by police than the U.S. This is 850 lives and many thousands of family members affected each year by gross negligence, of which most deaths could have easily been avoided.
Guess what other countries share similar police killing rates as the U.S.? Iran and the Philippines.
See my other reply that cites the Law Enforcement Officers Feloniously Killed statistics.
Also, you can pick ten black and ten white shootings at random and see what went down yourself. Though you shouldn't need to, if you're lazy. Just look at the justified shootings people have been protesting this year, because there haven't been enough legitimate bad ones.
They did that and the result was their stuff was burned to the ground. Afterwards, white people in power tried to pass more stringent building codes nominally on the theory that "They burned to the ground because they weren't built very well." completely ignoring the role that actively hostile racism played.
It didn't "just burn to the ground" due to some accident. It was torched by an invading force.
And that invading force then tried to change the building codes to prevent it from being rebuilt while pretending "it's for your own good -- your stuff burned to the ground because you losers didn't build it well enough."
The same applies to a lot of social justice issues. To some degree, it's helpful to just focus on building your own dream, but there are some very real issues where that's really not sufficient because other people will actively seek to destroy your dream and/or you because of who you are.
This needs to change. This unfortunate truth needs to be something much more in the past than it really is. (There are people who like to claim it is in the past. It's really not and such claims are part of the problem.)