Powerful segment at Tulsa’s Black Wall Street where Tiffany Cross and panel completely address the moral and economic reasons for reparations.
Tiffany Cross uses segment to make the case
Tiffany Cross was on Tulsa’s former black subdivision in Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as Black Wall Street. It was a prosperous area where the black citizens were massacred and their blocks bombed and burnt down.
I started the snippet with Cross’s interview with Tulsa’s Mayor G. T. Bynum. The mayor previously said that he is not thinking about reparation because it would divide the city.
Cross poignantly asked him if, given that his inherited wealth was based on his family’s ownership of nearly a thousand slaves and benefitted from the ills afflicted on black people if he did not feel responsible for reparations at risk of “offending” white Tulsans. He did not budge as he showed a nonempathetic straight face.
One panelist pointed out that Bynum’s family had several hundred years to build their wealth, while his Tulsa family had a mere five decades before his family was massacred in Tulsa. The other panelist pointed out that they were sitting on land formerly owned by black Tulsans. After the massacre, not one black person owns the land now. She also made it clear that while a commission has raised 30 million dollars in the name of the massacre, not one dollar has been awarded to any of the descendants.
Professor Jelani Cobb made the most moral argument stoked in today’s teaching-of Critical Race theory debate.
“The problem here is a fundamentally moral one,” Dr. Jelani Cobb said. “The people are seeking absolution from history. And when you seek absolution from the worst atrocities from history — and we know this well — what you do is facilitate the replication of those atrocities in the present.”
Cobb went on to point out that it was not coincidental that we had many other Right-Wing atrocities. He enumerated the January 6th Insurrection, the El Paso Massacre, and many others. But he ended with a prescient point.
“The vector of hatred moves through history,” Cobb said. And it is transmitted by denial,”