History as Truth-Telling: You Can’t Separate Black History from American History

I’ve often wondered why there is such a disconnect between Blacks and Whites regarding awareness of assaults on Black people. Federal Anti-Lynching Legislation was finally passed in the Senate a week ago, after being filibustered and tabled for decades. It was enacted only after Kentucky Senator Rand Paul was shamed into finally being persuaded to cast the final unanimous vote.

Too many Americans view events and atrocities that affect the fate and quality of Black folks’ lives as separate from them and compartmentalized. That is, Black lives are some how a detached, segregated appendage of the main American body politic. When tragic events occur they’re thus seen happening to “those poor black folks” not to “us as Americans.”

The Tulsa Race Riots of 1921, one of the most tragic historic events in American history, is such a narrative. Yet, even in spite of its impact and sociological significance as a watershed moment in American history, it has remained in the shadows (and foreshadows) and footnotes as little more than a sad epoch in Black history. Only recently has there been a more rigorous effort to deconstruct broader implications of the carnage heaped upon what was arguably the most successful commercial and residential African American community in the nation. Much of the devastation wrought by the riot in Tulsa resulted from arsons and heavy use of America’s military intervention, which used using U.S. aircraft to quell the unrest.

As our nation seeks to go forward from this moment of national renewed consciousness in crisis to establish a more perfect union we must engage our history as one contiguous whole. Our history books, civil discourse, and strategic planning to recalibrate missteps of bad policing policies, domestic militarism. and inadequate education curriculum must seek to communicate and integrate the inextricable connections between the African American story and all of American history. Rigorous scholarly truth telling, transparency, and the reeducation of Americans for America’s sake regarding the matter of race relations and national unity is a step in the right direction. D.Day 6.5.20