For this Memorial Day, spend a few moments reflecting on the actual history of the United States, beyond its self-congratulatory fictions of American exceptionalism:
The Stories We've Told: A Look at the Tulsa Race Massacre From The Root Archives
May 31, 2021
The first time most (white) Americans likely heard about the Tulsa Race Massacre was when HBO’s Watchmen opened its first episode—aired on October 20, 2019—with the devastating reenactment of the death and destruction that took place on May 31-June 1 in Greenwood, the Black neighborhood known as “Black Wall Street.”
Or if they missed that, HBO came through again when its genre-bending, horror/sci-fi series Lovecraft Country featured an entire episode in which the main characters traveled back in time to reconnect with their ancestors just as fire and white rage began to consume the Black community. (And shoutout to popular culture for doing a better job of teaching American history than most schools.)
But longtime readers of The Root—a site co-founded by noted historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.—have long known about one of the worst episodes of racial violence in American history. As the nation marks the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, The Root has pulled together a collection of stories from our archives, stories that capture the resilience of a community ravaged by racism—indeed, they are the stories of what it means to be Black in America...
Langston Hughes told us the fundamental truth that America has not yet for one day been the democracy it proclaims itself to be:
Let America Be America Again (excerpts)
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
White America’s collective delusions are the defining feature of our ‘self-evident truths’:
Suppression: A Common Thread in American Democracy
By Danyelle Solomon/ Center for American Progress
June 16, 2017
Throughout the life of this nation, we have consistently rewritten truths and operated in a foggy dystopia. This selective recognition and understanding of historical events has allowed the perpetuation of suppression—a root cause blocking our attainment of President Abraham Lincoln’s transformative vision of a “more perfect union.” From the moment European travelers landed on American shores, suppression tactics were employed—first against the Native American population but soon duplicated against the slave population. Suppression became a critical tool in building the current structures and systems of American democracy and has taken both physical and psychological forms throughout our nation’s history. Defined as “the conscious intentional exclusion from consciousness of a thought or feeling,” suppression has allowed white supremacy to become the baseline for all American structures, institutions, and policies. To truly reach the goal of a “more perfect union,” all Americans must attack suppression in all forms.
However, that can’t be accomplished because of our craven tendency toward collective denial and selective ignorance. It is incumbent that people of conscious standup and lay bare the lies, as Landrieu did when he removed monuments to an ugly past. He refused to let the lie of “a lost cause” to continue unchallenged. He made clear during his speech that the Civil War was not about the revisionist fiction of “states’ rights” but the maintenance of the brutal institution of slavery. He quoted the words of Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, who made clear their goals were centered around the “subordination to the superior race” and that their “new government” would be “the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
Failure to recognize our nation’s entire history, the good and the bad, only inhibits us from fully realizing the dream where are all men are created equal. This dangerous combination of psychological and physical suppression began at the inception of our country’s founding. It has provided extremely potent and effective tactics in rewriting American history by allowing the persistence of white supremacy.