Keeping Racism Alive Part I

EMPATHY IS GOOD. And usually, its not easy. I try to do more than merely bash conservatives, I try to understand the conservative viewpoint. When it comes to performing mental gymnastics like brainwashing myself to believe that a presidential election has been stolen, it becomes difficult. But take racism, for example. As near as I can make out, the essential conservative viewpoint about racism in contemporary America is that it no longer exists, or exists only in such small, isolated places and instances as to be largely ignorable. Racism, an outlier in today's America, a relic of a past dead and buried. Liberals, of course, see racism everywhere, here and now. Conservatives seem to believe that the main problem with racism in America today is that the damned liberals keep talking about it. So problematic do conservatives consider liberal harping on racism that in many conservative states, laws have been passed forbidding teaching racism in public schools as a current part of American society, and as a traditional historical reality, because conservatives do not consider such lessons fair, honest, and accurate, but rather, a form of liberal indoctrination. Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, a pair of one hundred and nine (109!) year old African-American women took their case to the state Supreme Court last week, arguing that reparations should be paid to the descendants of the victims of a racist massacre that happened more than one hundred years ago. These two ladies were six year old children when hate filled racists in Tulsa, Oklahoma burned to the ground the prosperous African-Amerian business and residential district of that city in 1921, killing several hundred people. On the one hundreth anniversary of the tragic event, in 2021, another lady was still living who remembered it, but has since died. These two ancient living ladies still remember it quite well; the fires, the burning smell, the screaming, the gunshots, all of it. And they have spent their entire lives in Tulas, working for justice, working for reparations. It is said by some that the way to live a long and healthy life is to live for a purpose, to live for something bigger than yourself. Perhaps, in their enduring decades long legal struggles, these two ladies have done exactly that. Tulsa was strictly segregated in 1921, but not oppressively so. The black community, largely unmolested, evolved in the early twentieth century into a very busy, prosperous business community, though isolated by race, prosperous, happy, and peaceful. It even evoked simmering jealousy among whites, which eventually exploded into violence. In today's Tulsa, the city is still segregated, but the African-American community prosperity of one hundred years ago never returned, was never allowed to return, was lost amid decades of systemic, systematic, white oppression, discrimination, segregataion, racism. Today in Tulsa, the wealth, income, and properly value differences between black Tulsa and white Tulsa are considerable. The racism from the "past" has a very large impact on today's society, obviously. For more than one hundred years prosperous white Tulas has preferred and continues to prefer to ignore the racism of the past and the present, has steadfastly refused to even hear arguments about making amends, seeking racial justice, making restitution, paying reparations. The excuse is that it all happened too long ago, and could not possibly be done fairly. That reasoning, that justification for doing nothing, will most likely never change. It will remain the same while the white conservatives continue to insist, fatuously, that racism no longer exists, and that the past is dead and buried. Meanwhile, there are a couple of one hundred and nine year old ladies who, along with the racism which has accompanied them throughout their entire long lives, are still very much alive.