I think back to a time when I was fifteen, merely standing on a corner, and a village cop all of maybe eight years older than I told me I had five minutes to get the fuck out of there before he’d ring us up on some charge. Don’t even know what that charge was supposed to be in retrospect, all I know when I remember that was that the asshole was definitely bluffing, or maybe he wasn’t and I’d’ve had to answer for it in a village court, a hundred something dollar fine, which was a lot of money back in 1999. It could’ve been a big deal, my mere presence upsetting the law and order of that community and the professional dignity of its hot shot bro cop tasked with upholding its sanctity from the chaos potentially wrought by a high school freshman who weighed 130 lbs soaking wet.

It’s not hard to think that if I were a Conservative at my age now, I’d be arrogant and Caucasian enough to believe that small moment of indignity and the many others I dealt with as a teenager in my shitty part-time jobs and incompetently managed high school would’ve equipped me to understand what it’s like to be Black in the United States in the 21st Century. I’d be pilloried as an asshole for white-splaining and rightfully so, because none of us whites truly understand.

That aside, the rest of this piece is not really connected to it. I suppose that in itself is the monumental complexity of approaching race relations editorially in this say and age. This is a tough subject, I’ve hit the delete button way too many times in writing it to backtrack, but to proceed cautiously and risk failure is better than not proceeding at all here. I don’t need to go too deep into my shame and embarrassment over the actions and words of my fellow Caucasians – hell this whole site is basically one long expression of that. But to go deeper, confront white privilege at its ugly core, stay on top of police brutality of Black folks, and make a sincere effort at making this site an agent of change is not in my wheelhouse, not yet at least.

Monday marks the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre, in which the the Greenwood District – also known as “The Black Wall Street” was razed by an angry mob of white locals. Like many of these awful episodes, in started with something stupid: The previous day, a 19-year old Black kid named Dick Rowland simply tripped and fell on a 17-year-old white girl when he was rushing to catch an elevator. She screamed in surprise, and Rowland ran off, correctly believing he was in trouble for the mishap. A white shop clerk who heard the scream and saw Rowland running away reported it to police as sexual assault. The girl, Sarah Page, declined to press charges, but it was too late. The next day’s Tulsa Tribune headline “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator” led an angry mob of whites to the courthouse where Rowland was being held. Local Blacks showed up to prevent a lynching, which turned into an armed confrontation which quickly spun out of control. As many as 300 were killed (only 50 of whom were white) and over 1,200 homes destroyed.

Here’s a depiction of it in the opening scenes of the Watchmen series on HBO:

Now does that look like “Critical Race Theory” to you? Or does it look like a fucking massacre that no one – schoolchildren especially – should ever be prevented from knowing about?

I’ll be very honest: “Critical Race Theory” sounds like some Ivory Tower bullshit that a politically moderate suburbanite leaning either toward left or right would be very well within their right to roll their eyes at, cooked up by tenured clowns who’ve never held a job outside of academia. The word “critical” is not helpful whatsoever from a branding perspective. Whoever came up with it made it all too easy for the MAGA shitheads to seize upon it in a crusade to bury this nation’s sordid history of abuse and repression toward Black Americans and how those incidents still reverberate today. The Republican Party – once founded with the sole reason of Black liberation – exists now only to sustain its own power by turning its fanbase’s cultural insecurities against minorities into votes, and this “Critical Race Theory” jihad just one more example of that.

Racial enmity isn’t going to go away without knowledge of where it comes from, what white privilege is, and a big part of why many African Americans are still economically disadvantaged today, all these years later. Pretending it never happened by making it a thoughtcrime to educate people on that history is a disgrace and some third-world dictator bullshit. It’s un-American.

The “fuck your feelings” crew don’t mind that. They feel any means are necessary to confront the scourge of white guilt they believe is being forced upon them now that African Americans asserting themselves politically than perhaps any other time in American history. Draconian voter suppression laws, embracing of white nationalists and Neo-Nazis, campaigning with the fucking Klan – all of it is a desperate attempt to cling to power.

Recognizing that, and doing everything in your power to oppose it is how you honor the memories of all those who were victimized in Tulsa and everywhere else over the years for simply having the wrong color of skin. It gets complicated by the noise and the reticence and the “microaggressions” of academia, but at the end of the day there’s no real grey area in this moral test.

It’s all black and white.