the tderpm game is:
make a charge of some significance, notwithstanding that it's an incident over 80 years old.
Then challenge people to discuss it as though it's somehow evidence of anything happening today.
It is after all a background.
Tulsa didn't happen in a vacuum. It was part of an infamous slice of our own history that our history books gloss over with the "gay '90s" and "roaring '20s" and "age of invention" veneer, but the era between roughly Reconstruction and the second World War were some of the most racist, most disgusting decades we ever had. And they're not that long ago that they don't have an influence.
Lynchings ran rampant. Bob Dylan's song "Desolation Row" is about one such incident that took place in Duluth, about as far north as you can get and still be in the United States. D.W. Griffith put out a blatantly racist film called "Birth of a Nation" and at the same time Georgia doctor William Simmons resurrected the Ku Klux Klan, a vigilante group that had died out by 1880 and adopted the flaming cross icon from that film. This new Klan made inroads not only the South but the midwest and west, and even elected a few public officials. So the riot in Tulsa didn't just spark from nothing; there was a long and painful backstory.
Arguably it was WWII itself that provided the catalyst to put a stop to this barbarity, but again --- not that long ago especially as regards building blocks of culture. This was the era our grandparents came up in.
Not a damn thing wrong with knowing our own history. Especially when it's one that has been glossed over. The Civil Rights movement didn't spring from nothing either; this era was its direct antecedent.
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