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From revelation to reckoning to revolution: In pursuit of racial justice
By:   []
Date:None

Long undisturbed rocks of the American legacy have been overturned in recent years, and with each one, more of the racism that is deeply embedded in the US’s soil is exposed for all of us to confront.

For many Americans, 1 June marked the overturning of one more such rock. A hundred years ago, a white mob violently leveled the thriving ‘Black Wall Street’ community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. An estimated 300 people were killed. Well over 1,200 buildings were destroyed, some by fire bombs from private planes. One estimate puts the cost of the damage at more than $200m in today’s dollars.

Yet this cataclysmic moment in American history – in which victims were not compensated and perpetrators were not punished – was so efficiently buried that decades later even some Black Tulsa residents were surprised to learn this happened. And it was not until 100 years later that a US president, Joe Biden, actually went to the scene of the horror to pay homage to its victims and call the evil out for what it was.

We know that the virulent racism that destroyed Greenwood was not a singular episode but a raging river that has shaped our history and our present in the most fundamental ways – etching barriers to creating a society in which each of us is valued and bonded in a sacred circle of mutuality. Yet, while America’s powerful and privileged have never been shy about redesigning natural landscapes – often in foolish, self-defeating ways – to serve the interests of capital, these same people resist the deep structural and moral excavation needed to undo the corruption racism has done to America’s topology, even as some of them profess a desire for racial equity and reparative justice.

Hence we have what President Biden brought to Tulsa on that day: a set of proposals to address structural racism and its consequences that was at once an exceptional statement of policy and a tragic missed opportunity.

It is true that the proposals to “build Black wealth and narrow the racial wealth gap” are positive attempts to address serious consequences of the US’s structural racism. Initiatives such as funding for tearing down highways that destroyed Black neighborhoods, investigating the wealth theft that occurs through racism in home appraisals, and a $10bn revitalization fund, which promises to give communities more of a say in how revitalization takes place, are correctives to evils that should never have been allowed to persist into the 21st century.
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