Christopher Rivera, Period 7, 1/4/2023

 Christopher Rivera, Period 7, 1/4/2023

Socio-political Consciousness:

• What are your thoughts and feelings about issues of inequity, oppression, and/or power? 

• How do you reflect critically on your own beliefs, assumptions, values, and experiences, and how can these influence your perception of self and others?

American elementary schools teach a very sanitized, almost romanticized version of American history, filled with heroes like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr., fighting for virtuous American ideals. Unfortunately, the real world is messy and complicated, and history is no exception. Reaching beyond the patriotic and inspiring anecdotes, our story as a nation contains violent atrocities, deplorable ideologies, and a running theme of oppression. Even though the founders claimed that “all men are created equal,” American history is full of abject failures to reach that loft ideal. 

The most common understanding of racism in the American south during the Jim Crow era (between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s) involves images of segregation and discrimination - black people being forced to drink from different water fountains, use different bathrooms, and sit in different bus sections. These practices represented just the surface of racist hatred that was fostered in this country. On August 28, 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black teen in Mississippi was kidnapped, beaten, mutilated, shot, and thrown into a river by two white men after Till had allegedly flirted with a white woman. The killers were arrested but quickly acquitted by an all-white jury on the grounds that the body was so mutilated that identification was impossible. The two killers then spoke openly about committing the murders in a magazine article. The murder of Emmett Till represented a continuation of a decades-long pattern of racial killings. Between 1877 and 1950, around 4,000 black people were lynched - viciously murdered by mobs for alleged crimes. The rationale for lynching ranged from accusations of crimes (usually rape or murder of whites) to violating racial customs. Some lynchings were turned into spectacles, with the victim being tortured, mutilated, dismembered, hanged, and burned alive in front of huge, cheering crowds. Southerners even went as far as to create postcards depicting lynchings and mutilated corpses surrounded by grinning spectators. Most lynchings were carried out with the approval of local authorities and law enforcement, thus almost none of the lynchers were ever arrested. Whenever anti-lynching legislation was introduced into the Senate, the bills were filibustered to death by Southern senators hell-bent on opposing any federal interference in the practice of lynching.

Perhaps one of the worst episodes of racial violence in America occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. Most of the city’s black residents lived in the community of Greenwood, which contained a successful business district sometimes called Black Wall Street. On May 21, a young black teen named Dick Rowland was arrested by police for allegedly assulting a white woman. A baseless rumor spread that Rowland had tried to rape the woman, and that night an armed white lynch mob assembled outside the courthouse demanding that Rowland be released to them. The sheriff refused, and some armed black men arrived at the courthouse to defend Rowland from the mob. The two groups clashed, a shot was fired, and the mob quickly became a riot. For the next 24 hours, a white mob looted and burned down 35 city blocks of the Greenwood district, killing between 100 and 300 people, mostly black. After the riot, police and state militia records of the events were hidden, and the scope of the damage and deaths was not investigated until the 1970s. Violence was a key tool for maintaining racial oppression. The threat of a brutal attack prevented blacks from voting, protesting discrimination, or speaking out against the suppression of their civil rights. Richard Wright, a black author who grew up surrounded by stories of lynchings, wrote, “Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen was a more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew.”

When I first learned about these events in my AP US History class, I was appalled. I knew about the segregation laws of the Jim Crow era but was unaware of the levels of depraved racist violence that occurred during this dark period of our nation’s history. I was even more horrified to learn that so many Americans - average people, law enforcement, and politicians - were either complacent or outright supportive of this oppression. I believe it is imperative for Americans to know of the past horrors of violent racial oppression because the country is at risk of forgetting them. Decades after the successes of the Civil Rights Movement, I feel like many people today downplay racism as a relic of a distant past, and thus refuse to acknowledge it as an issue in modern America. When the history of lynching and race riots and racial terrorism goes untaught, Americans will forget how absolutely devastating racism can be. There are currently 98 white nationalist groups in the United States, including the KKK and neo-nazis, spreading their message of hatred mostly through social media platforms. This year, a white man murdered ten black people in a Buffalo supermarket after being radicalized by those white supremacist groups. The ideology of racial oppression still exists in the United States, and history proves just how horrific its consequences can be.

Learning about the history of violent racial oppression in America caused me to critically reflect on my perception of the United States of America. I grew up believing that America was a “good” country, a nation that left an honorable, albeit flawed, legacy in history. After learning so much more about the story of racism in our history, I can no longer stand by this patriotic assertion. How can a nation which lets mobs publicly torture innocents to death be a “good” country? I have come to the belief that America is no more morally justified than any other country in the world. Every nation has a history of brutal oppression, and America is no different. In situations like this, when my beliefs are challenged by new information, I try to transform by worldview to combine what I originally thought with what I just learned. I still believe that there is much to be celebrated in American history. America pioneered modern representative democracy, the institution which would eventually serve to elevate so many oppressed groups throughout the world. There are so many heroes in America, people like  George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, who fought to set the nation on the proper course. It is equally important to recognize the triumphs and atrocities of our history because only through understanding the roots of oppression can work to end it, once and for all.