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Tom Chavez
Gregg and Al,
Black Lives Matter is not a “white global supremacist organization” as Al calls it. The cause of marches and demonstrations is not due to “facts are being distorted and spun to foment hate, racial activism riots, and extreme violence by political extremists.”
The current demonstrations are the result of a long history of oppression and discrimination. People who have been marginalized by double standards and injustice due to their ethnicity, religion or social position are demonstrating for the right to be treated equally by American institutions and agencies.
The problems have been going on a long time, from the time of slavery. The wealth gap began with slavery. White folks became rich by brutally exploiting black slave labor. That is an undistorted fact.
JIm Crow laws put in place after the Civil War kept black people impoverished and marginalized. Beginning in the 1920s systemic exclusion of black people from the U.S. housing market blocked them from one of the main engines of accumulating wealth in America.
Restrictive covenants limited where black people could live. These covenants, combined with discriminatory credit policies, kept black people from building wealth. At the same time, government policies were put in place to assist whites to build wealth through housing.
In Minneapolis, where the current protests began after the death of George Floyd, white Americans first benefitted from the Homestead Act. White soldiers coming home from World War II were given cheap loans to buy homes in the surrounding suburbs. These neighborhoods were off limits to black people.
And the only prosperous black community in the city was razed to the ground to build a highway to St. Paul. White people accumulated wealth holdings through discriminatory public policy entitlements unaccessible to ‘others.’
When black people were able to develop their own businesses and neighborhoods, they faced bias and discrimination. One of the deadliest and most covered up acts of racial violence in our country occurred in the summer of 1921.
Blacks had built up families and businesses in the Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Thousands of white supremacists, including many who were deputized and given weapons by city officials, stormed their town, looted their businesses, torched their buildings, and murdered hundreds in cold blood.
Photo shows the aftermath of the white mobs that attacked black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Bettmann Archive/Getty
According to the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot, 11,000 black citizens lived in Tulsa at the time, most in the Greenwood section. About 300 were killed, and over 8,000 lost their homes. Guardsmen imprisoned hundreds of black citizens and held 6,000 people in a temporary detention.
Not a single white person who partook in this mass murder has ever been arrested, prosecuted or held legally responsible for the horror they inflicted.
So, in addition to slavery, white people have also committed genocide against black Americans. This would be horrible enough if it only happened once. But white supremacists got away with brutality, destruction, and murder again when they burned down the entire town of Rosewood Florida in 1923.
Such incidents were kept out of U.S. history textbooks until the 1990s. White people have controlled our history books and conversations. As students we never heard about the Tulsa Massacre or similar incidents. We never heard about hundreds and thousands of extra-judicial lynchings and other injustices.
Such history was totally swept under the national rug and hidden from the general public for years until eye-witness accounts surfaced and were added to the public domain. White supremacy has skewed the narrative of our nation’s past to unjustly favor and prioritize one group of people over another.
This is what the demonstrations are about. It is not a conspiracy “by global political puppet masters to destroy the American Dream,” as Al calls it.
People want to change the institutions to eliminate systemic prejudice and injustice. There are smart judicious ways to do that. With a little intelligence and good will, we can improve society. It is an effort to actualize and make real the American Dream for everyone, and not just for one group or another.
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