Most people know little to nothing about the Tulsa Race Massacre. Prior to 2017, I was one of that number. I learned about this tragedy when preparing to teach the novel, Tulsa Burning to my Gifted and Talented students. Then a little over a month ago, the American History Tellers podcast showed me just how little I actually knew. I listened in horror as those events unfolded, retold nearly a century later.
In 1921, a young white female elevator operator accused a young African American shoeshiner of assault. As is often the case, no one knows the exact details of the instigating event which ended up lost in obscurity, vastly overshadowed by the avalanche of catastrophe. After the shoeshiner’s arrest for the alleged assault and detention in the county jail, a mob of white vigilantes gathered to lynch him. While the sheriff managed to prevent the lynching, he failed to stop the subsequent confrontation between the mob and a group of African American World War I veterans who came to defend the shoeshiner which ended with 12 people dead, 10 white and 2 black. The mob retaliated, deputized and armed by the mayor, over the next several days by rampaging through the African American suburb of Tulsa, Greenwood, looting and burning everything, pulling citizens form their homes and interning them if they decided against killing them on the spot. 10,000 people lost their homes, their belongings and their livelihoods. After the Oklahoma National Guard imposed martial law, the white city council decided that the interned African Americans would clean up their destroyed homes after being sponsored by their white employers. They had to work for a pittance wage while wearing a tag stating their sponsored state. (I shuddered when I learned that.) While the Red Cross and a dedicated local lawyer helped the African Americans of Greenwood keep their land, nothing remained the same and soon everyone stopped talking about the massacre causing the events to fall into forgotten history, nearly lost to time forever. How could we forget?
This post, however, is not a history lesson, although history inspired it. In a short period of time, I learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre way more than I wrote above, and more about the Tuskegee Syphilis study while also watching the first episode of “When They See Us,” the dramatized retelling of the unjustly incarcerated Central Park Five. Mom and I both felt horrified at the dehumanizing of these people. I felt even more convicted to do everything I could to always see everyone I meet as the valuable people created in God’s image that they are.
The tipping point for this post came when I read an AP article regarding two tragic migrant deaths on the Rio Grande. The picture broke my heart, a young father lay face down with his nearly two year old daughter face down beside him, her arm tucked under his shirt and resting on his shoulder in one last embrace. Their deaths should not have happened. This family presented themselves at a point of entry seeking asylum but because the current administration has throttled the legal entries for asylum seekers, they could not get in. As is usually the case, no one aside from the immediate players in the story know exactly what happened next. The world, however, knows the outcome. This small family made their way from the legal port of entry to a point where they could possibly cross the Rio Grande. The father swam across the river with his daughter, intending to leave her safely on the United States shore. She could not bear to be parted from him as he turned back to help his wife across. This young woman had to stand on the Medican shore and watch as the Rio Grande swept away her husband and child. These deaths are on Trump’s head. As President Eisenhower declared, “the buck stops here.” Immigration is a complicated issue with a multitude of factors which I do not tackle here. Those issues do not change the fact that two people died who should not have. Children should not suffer separation from their parents who followed the legal avenue for asylum. People should not have to choose between abject poverty and gang violence in their native countries and hostile, inhumane treatment at the hands of those who enjoy safety and wealth in the world’s superpower.
When one confronts this hard history, what do you do? How do you interpret and process the information? How will you handle the things that appear beyond belief? How will you make sense of the incomprehensible? That depends on your paradigm, the set of boundaries and framework through which we made sense of the world. As we grow up, we build the paradigm through the inputs of our life, a large share coming from our parents, the people who raise us. Our paradigm shifts, or should shift, when we encounter that which does not fit our current paradigm. We can, however, choose to ignore all that falls outside our paradigm or manipulate it until it fits, distorting the truth as we do. This unwillingness to shift the paradigm afflicts us with paradigm paralysis.
Paradigm paralysis explains innumerable historical tragedies, explains but does not excuse. The casual discarding of alibi evidence exists because the paradigm dictates the guilt of dark-skinned teenage boys. Paradigm paralysis justifies the distortion of Native Americans in artistic portrayals of the pioneers. They had the right to take that land because animals can’t have property rights. Throw out the truth of the history of immigration to justify harsh treatment of asylum seekers with darker skin because certain ancestors “did it the right way.” Stop talking about certain ugly truths to cover up guilt and shame in the face of others because if no one knows it happened, you can maintain the paradigm.
Paradigm paralysis lies ahead as the easy path. A paradigm shift involves a shift back to zero, a complete rebuilding of the framework based on what the light of truth reveals. It doesn’t feel good to acknowledge that you screwed up, that you have done something wrong. We struggle to acknowledge that we are wrong, capable of so much ugliness. This acknowledgement humbles us, brings us to the point where we have to say that we do not know everything and invites us to reach out for help in the most unlikely of of sources.
I reach the end of this post convicted of two things primarily. One, I want to learn as much as I can about every aspect of history no matter how ugly or uncomfortable. Two, and more importantly, I need to challenge how I look at others, the ones I believe ar deep in some sort of paradigm paralysis. I realize that I have been guilty of painting them all with the same brush so that they fit my paradigma nd not God’s. I need to humble myself and cry out to God for His help in rebuilding this paradigm, to view all as beautiful, broken images of God, worthy of love and compassion.