It's depressingly fitting that a nationwide spree of protests against racist policing would occur on the anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, what's been called the single worst incident of racial violence in American history. Using guns and aircrafts, white racists destroyed 35 square blocks of what had — until then — been the wealthiest black community in the country, resulting in more than $32 million dollars in damage adjusted for inflation. Like many such tragic events, it began when white racists accused a black man of looking at a white woman the wrong way.
And sadly, it's a thing that most people didn't even know about it until they watched Damon Lindelof's Watchmen sequel on HBO in the fall of 2019. It took 80 years before any kind of official report was made to acknowledge the event; mass graves are still being discovered nearly a century later.
Here are some links if you want to learn more:
‘Watchmen’ Opened With the Tulsa Race Riot. Here’s What to Read About It. [Jennifer Vineyard / The New York Times]
"They was killing black people" [DeNeen L. Brown / The Washington Post]
The Massacre of Black Wall Street [Re/Think / The Atlantic]
Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921
Black Wall Street: The African American Haven That Burned and Then Rose From the Ashes [Victor Luckerson / The Ringer]
Image: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
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A black delivery driver in Oklahoma was blocked by a white man who didn't want the driver to leave his gated community until he explained why he was there. The driver, who eventually broke down in tears, was detained by the man – and another neighborhood resident who joined in – for over 30 minutes.
From NBC:
[Travis] Miller, 42, told NBC News that his customer in Edmond gave him the code to get through the neighborhood's gate. After completing the delivery and as they were trying to exit, a man who identified himself as David Stewart and a board member of the homeowners' association can be seen on the video questioning Miller and his co-worker about why they were on his street.
Miller said in the video that he was trying to make a U-turn and that as he turned around, the man was blocking him in with a white Subaru.
"If I go around him, I'm going to have to drive on somebody's property and I don't want to make a bad situation worse," Miller said in the video.
Miller repeatedly asked the man to move the car.
"I'm not moving," the man said. "All you have to do is tell me where you're going."
Miller refused, saying he did not have to tell the man anything.
Here's the full video: Read the rest
Jeremy O. Harris's Slave Play is meant to be provocative—certainly moreso than most other Broadway productions that transfer from Off Broadway theatres. The play itself is about a group of interracial couples who go to a kind of psychosexual couples' therapy that involves BDSM, reflecting Antebellum master-slave dynamics. During previews, the show even hosted a "Black Out," or a dedicated performance for black audiences, so they can enjoy and discuss the play without worrying about the reactions of white people around them.
As such, it's not surprising that it might make some white people (and others) uncomfortable; that is, after all, the purpose of provocative art. But it reached a head after the Friday night performance on November 29 during a post-show talkback hosted by the playwright:
Apparently, the unnamed woman missed the whole part of the play about white people taking up space and centering things around themselves. She yelled at Harris for—in her words—"being told as a single woman I'm not good enough to fucking raise [my own children]," and asked, "How the fuck am I not a fucking marginalized member of this goddamn society?" Read the rest
Thoughts and prayers. Video games are fucking folks up. He's white so let's call it mental illness. Apologists for the far right talking shit. It's always the same song and dance anytime some asshole with a credit card buys an assault rifle to do what they feel entitled to do to innocent souls. As an outsider who watches terrorist acts like the one that unfold unfolded in El Paso this past weekend, one after another, it's a tune that I'm tired of hearing. I can't imagine how the citizens of your nation must feel. I mourn for your dead the way that I mourned for our own when a similar tragedy struck a few years back. Mourning and rising up in protest are all that we as citizens have available to us to give voice to our outrage.
That's not the case, however, where a grieving nation is concerned. During the El Paso terrorist attack, seven Mexican nationals were killed. Six were wounded. Their nation's government, in their grief, has decided that it's had enough.
From Buzzfeed News:
Mexico's foreign minister on Monday called the mass shooting at a Texas Walmart that claimed the lives of eight Mexican nationals an act of terrorism against its citizens on US soil and vowed to take legal action.
Marcelo Ebrard, who had threatened to take action after the shooting, said the Mexican government will "definitely" launch legal action against the selling and distribution of assault rifles in the US, like the one used by the shooter in Saturday's attack.
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The North Carolina Ku Klux Klan offers you "racial greetings" and invites you to celebrate the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States with a good old fashioned parade, dressed in sheets.
Via Snopes:
A spokeswoman for the group, who provided us with the name Amanda, said the parade would be "unannounced." She did not give us any further information, such as the event's time or specific location, other than to say it will take place in North Carolina.
The KKK representative was responding to our inquiry as to whether the group had held a Trump victory rally on 9 November 2016 on a freeway overpass in the city of Mebane. She confirmed they had not, but she alerted us to the upcoming parade.
We reached out to the press office for Trump's campaign for comment and have not heard back.
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Dylan Matthews has a wonderful piece up on Vox, Taking Trump voters’ concerns seriously means listening to what they’re actually saying, which points out that in order to heal the great divide in the United States we're going to have to admit what Trump's popularity is all about: a fading, racist white majority is struggling to maintain primacy.
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