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I'm glad that the 1921 Tulsa pogrom is gaining higher prominence in the popular American memory (there's probably a better phrase for that but I either don't know it or can't recall it at the moment) but I'm slightly worried that people are going to see it as singular. It wasn't.
If anything distinguishes the Tulsa pogrom, it was its scale -- but mass anti-black violence happened frequently from the end of Reconstruction and into the 1920s.
Moreover, when you read the details of some of these pogroms, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that some of them were so successful that we don't even, today, know that they even happened.
at the pogrom in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919, for instance, which was the same scale as the Tulsa massacre, the white militias cut phone lines leading into the city, and much of the contemporaneous press coverage was actually part of a cover-up engineered by the government
My recollection of Elaine (I have a suspect long term memory for some stuff & read about this years ago) is that the propaganda campaign was so successful that the only people indicted for it were black people, and that only a legal campaign by the NAACP prevented 19 executions.
yeah. the other problem with the phrase is that "riot" has a connotation of spontaneity and aimlessness. Many of these were planned, coordinated events with specific goals https://twitter.com/nothingsmonstrd/status/1274401118215376901
my take on the other issue of the day: statues are symbols and symbols are important. the question of whether to take down a statue is important for the same reason that the question of whether to erect a statue in the first place.
considering questions like "what did the people who put up this statue mean when they put it up", "what would someone coming across this statue now take it to mean", "would we put up a statue of this person now", and so forth are good questions and it's a good debate to have
in debating the question, we're really talking about what kind of society we want and what its values should be, and I think that's good
. sorry to sound like mister rogers, but that's my real take.
. sorry to sound like mister rogers, but that's my real take.
