Hello again. It’s been some time since last I posted. Then again, this is by no means the longest hiatus this blog has had. I’ve been noodling around with a post about the wall I hit in early May, and the anxiety and depression the lockdown induced for the remainder of the month. I may or may not post that … in the present moment, however, it seems more than a little self-centered.
Since the murder of George Floyd and the massive protests that have swept not just the U.S. but the world, I’ve been trying to work through my thoughts as a white man of enormous privilege, and my relationship to these events, and how best I can respond and be an ally. The best response I think sympathetic white people can have is simple: listen; read; listen more; put your resources where they’re best used, like donating to organizations that help Black causes; keep listening; shut up; and when you’re not shutting up, talk amongst ourselves to foment anti-racist attitudes and actions. The onus at this point in time should not be on making Black, Indigenous, and people of colour do the emotional work of explaining to us yet again the realities of systemic racism and white supremacy.
To that end, I’ve been working on a handful of posts addressing issues arising from the turmoil of the protests, and I’m aiming them at my white friends. Not exclusively, mind you—I’m just writing with a white audience in mind, and if anyone wants to step in and tell me where I’m fucking up? Please. By all means.
Anyway, I do have a tendency to ramble, so here’s the TL;DR: we’re learning about the elisions of Black history of late, and we, as white people, would do well to grasp that if we actually want to help in the process of dismantling white supremacy.
Though Donald Trump’s ignorance is boundless, and there are countless ways in which he demonstrates it, I think my favourite is when he cites a widely-known fact and then proceeds to make it painfully obvious that he had just learned it moments before. Case in point: that time he mentioned that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, following up that observation by saying “Not many people know that, but it’s true.” Which made me wonder at the time how he’d managed to go through life, and indeed the nominating process for the Republican Party, never having heard it referred to as “the party of Lincoln.” (I like to imagine his shock at hearing that the president who freed the slaves and defeated the Confederacy wasn’t just a Republican, but was indeed one of the founders of the party; in Trump’s mayfly-like brain I have to think he just assumed anyone who was anti-slavery and anti-confederacy was a politically correct SJW and therefore a Democrat).
There are numerous other such instances, many of which were the inevitable by-product of his daily COVID-19 press briefings, where he demonstrated his ignorance not just of basic medicine but common sense, such as when he asked why they just weren’t using flu vaccines to combat coronavirus, or of course whether drinking disinfectant or getting a UV enema would be an effective treatment.
Most recently (as of this writing, that is—in the time it takes me to rattle out this post, he’s almost certainly exhibited his ignorance in dozens of ways), he took credit for making Juneteenth “famous.” In an interview, he said, “I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous. It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it.”
I cannot begin to enumerate the ways in which having Donald J. Trump take credit for one of the most important dates in the Black American calendar is infuriating—and I say that as a white guy. I cannot begin to imagine how such an enormity lands in the Black community, though I suspect that there are possibly more long-suffering sighs than shouts of rage. I could be wrong, of course, but ignorance of Black history among white Americans (and white people generally) is a long-standing issue keenly felt by African Americans; and if there is an uncomfortable truth buried in Trump’s self-aggrandizement, it’s this: he’s not exactly wrong. He has made Juneteenth famous, albeit inadvertently, and through an act of offensive scheduling I suspect was deliberate. Not by Trump, of course, who, it turns out, had to be told why people were outraged he’d scheduled a rally on June 19th by a Black Secret Service agent in his detail.
By now, many of those who had been previously unaware of the significance of the date have been schooled, but I’ll leave it to Amber Ruffin to deliver a succinct explanation:
I’ve known the significance of Juneteenth for a long time, but the way in which I learned it was mortifying enough to deserve a retelling. I can even point to the year in which I was enlightened on this point: 1999, the year in which Ralph Ellison’s second novel, Juneteenth, was published posthumously to a certain amount of controversy. Ellison was the author of the 1952 novel Invisible Man, a landmark work of African-American literature, and, in my professional opinion (and not an outlier opinion, by any means), one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. It remained the only novel Ellison wrote in his lifetime (he died in 1994). When Juneteenth was published, there was controversy over whether or not Ellison had wanted that—which of course, excited a lot of debate among academic types. I was in the second year of my PhD, and first heard about Juneteenth from an American Lit prof at Western. We discussed the ethics of such posthumous publication over pints at the Grad Club, and I said in passing, “Weird title, though.” At which the professor cocked his head, and proceeded to gently explain the significance of the word.
As I say, it was mortifying. But not quite as mortifying as the fact that it was only many years later, as an actual tenured professor of American literature, that I learned about the Tulsa race massacre of 1921.
The galling offense of Trump’s planned June 19th rally is compounded by the fact that it will be held in Tulsa, Oklahoma—not today, as originally planned, but tomorrow, out of “respect” for Juneteenth—the site of the single worst episode of anti-Black racial violence in American history. Tulsa had a lively and prosperous Black community. Part of the Greenwood district of Tulsa was known colloquially as “Black Wall Street,” as it boasted a significant number of prosperous Black-owned businesses And over the course of two days in 1921, whites, led by members of the KKK, descended on Greenwood with guns, clubs, and bombs, beating and shooting people, and burning Black homes and businesses. They even employed airplanes to strafe and bomb the residents and buildings from the sky. The putative reason for the violence was the same as that for so many lynchings in American history: a young Black man was accused of assaulting a white woman, and was taken into custody. When some members of the Black community converged on the courthouse in order to prevent the young man from meeting such a fate, they were met by a white mob. Shots were fired, and the city descended into an orgy of violence against Greenwood, Black Wall Street, and its inhabitants.
For a more thorough recounting of the brutal and tragic events of those two days, read Brent Staples’ piece in the New York Times.
The Tulsa Massacre, as so many such events have, fell down the memory hole of history. Indeed, it was actively erased: it wasn’t until the 1990s that a thorough accounting of the massacre was made, and even then it has largely remained a lacuna in mainstream retellings of American history. So when Donald Trump takes credit for making Juneteenth famous, he may as well also claim to have reminded white Americans about a forgotten episode of American history. The specific scheduling of this rally in Tulsa, I am certain, was lost on Trump, but I cannot believe it was accidental: Trump is an historical ignoramus, but there are those on his staff (I’m looking at you, Stephen Miller) with knowledge enough and malevolence aplenty to have been deliberate in this insult. As Adam Serwer said in what I think is the most insightful evaluation of the Trump Administration’s motivations, “The Cruelty is the Point.”
It is a point of profound embarrassment to me that it was only relatively recently that I learned of the Tulsa Massacre. I might well be admitting professional malpractice: as someone who frequently teaches African-American literature, I invariably deliver several lectures evert year in which I offer historical context about the realities of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the history of lynching, and the myriad other brutalities and indignities visited on Black America so that my students might have an inkling of context when they read Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Audre Lorde, Colson Whitehead, James Baldwin, or any of the other brilliant Black authors whom I have had the privilege of teaching. And yet it was only about two or three years ago when I read the novel Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff (ironically, a white author) that I first really learned about Tulsa. More recently, the HBO series Watchmen—based upon Alan Moore’s landmark 1985 graphic novel—made the Tulsa Massacre a core event of its reworking of the source material, indeed making it the first scene of the series (be warned: this is actually somewhat difficult to watch):
My ultimate point here is that Trump has accidentally given us a gift: whatever malevolent intent lurks behind the scheduling of his rally on Juneteenth in Tulsa, we should refocus the energy of the outrage that evokes into introspection: realizing that these historical elisions are emblematic of the much larger issue of race in America, and quite possibly using that as a retort whenever someone bleats about the removal of Confederate monuments as “erasing history”—to point out that all such monuments were already erasures of history, given that they were erected with the express purpose of (literally) whitewashing the twin legacies of slavery and the Civil War.
it's all narrative 