Last week, I got an email from a very dear friend of mine asking my thoughts on a current trend that she can’t quite figure out. My friend is a brilliant white woman in her 70s who was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and spent a great deal of her life in the American South before eventually landing in Hollywood where she spent over two decades in a key role involved with several movies, I guarantee you’ve seen. Most are considered modern classics. Politically, she is progressive. Socially she is kind and has spent a lifetime believing in equality for all peoples regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, orientation, class, or economic status. More importantly, she has something lacking in most people today, particularly in my generation and subsequent ones: good old fashioned common sense.
I have been blessed to call this incredible lady my pal for almost twenty years now. Given her credentials in life experience, when she comes to me with a question, I try to think long and hard before I answer it. What she has been trying to wrap her head around is what the right wing fears about teaching American children the history of the struggles of Black people in this country. What is the danger in accurately educating them about the realities of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, systemic racism, and the Civil Rights struggle? Why are the governor of Florida and his ilk so terrified by the truth, that they’re obsessed with all things “woke,” banning books and legislating gag orders on teachers regarding the discussions of American history that don’t subscribe to the fallacy that George Washington didn’t chop down that cherry tree and Gone with the Wind and its happy, well-cared-for slaves is a documentary? “Woke,” incidentally, is a term that over 60% of Americans polled view as a positive term denoting understanding of and empathy for people unlike themselves.
I thought about my friend’s question, and it reminded me of an incident a number of years ago when my first solo play, Not A Genuine Black Man, was early in its initial San Francisco run. If you’ve never seen Genuine, it’s about the struggles my African American family faced when we moved to San Leandro, California, a suburb of Oakland, in the early 1970s when the city was somewhere between 94% and 99.99% white. It had a national reputation as a racist enclave and was considered by advocates of Fair Housing as one of America’s most racist suburbs. The U.S. Commission on Discrimination in Housing called the city “a racist bastion of white supremacy.”
I researched that play for two years before setting pen to paper. Along the way I discovered long-lost documents on how the city’s real estate industry, homeowner’s associations, city government and police department conspired to keep San Leandro an all-white ghetto. I found Newsweek magazine clippings and transcripts of Civil Rights hearings held to investigate why financially qualified people of color were denied mortgages in San Leandro by big banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America. I found a long-lost documentary on the situation that had aired nationally in 1971. I interviewed people who had lived in the city at the time, including white Fair Housing advocates, whose lives, and the lives of their preschool children, were threatened because they were working to bring “those people” into the community. I talked to black people with stories of having crosses burned on their lawns and shotguns blasting in their front doors. I even met an African American man who told me that the San Leandro mayor and city council got involved to intervene when word got out that he was taking a white girl to his senior prom at San Leandro High.
In short, I didn’t pull these things out of my ass. I worked hard to compile as much research as I possibly could. Once I’d gathered as much information as I could stomach, I wrote my play.
A few weeks after the show opened and became a literal phenomenon in the Bay Area, I was in a San Leandro coffee shop when I was approached by a young white man I didn’t know. He was a few years older than me, and I got the feeling he’d grown up in San Leandro.
“I saw your show last weekend and LOVED it,” he said, clapping me on the back.
“Thanks,” I said.
“I’m recommending it to all my friends,” he said.
“I really appreciate that,” I replied.
“I’m telling them it’s a ‘must see.’ Even if you don’t buy it, it’s still a great show,” he said as he walked out the door.
His words reverberated in my ears. Even if you don’t buy it.
Two years I’d spent researching. I had articles, video recordings, audio recordings, congressional transcripts, and he dismissed them all by saying, “Even if you don’t buy it.”
It was then that I recognized the pattern that occurs when it comes to some white people and stories of the oppression and subjugation by their ancestors and the benefits they’ve inherited in everything from material wealth to social status in the American caste system. African American stories of diaspora and racist atrocities are whispered from generation to generation. That’s how they’ve stayed alive. When we told whites, they said we were “lying.” Then, as technology and resources advanced and we were able to prove the veracity of the stories our grandmothers told us on her knee, we were told, “Why are you harping on that? Let it go. You’re just dividing people.” When we refused to do that and continued telling our stories and relating our experiences, the only recourse left was to attempt to permanently erase our experiences from history. If a few generations aren’t taught about it, it never happened. This helps maintain the current caste system in America and life goes on as before with people of color being blamed for their own plight. That there was no involvement in the building of this country by Black people and that they and their descendants were not wrongfully denied the ability to share in the fruits of their (often forced) labor. That there is no generational wealth in black communities because our forefathers were prohibited, in some cases by law, from purchasing homes seventy-five years ago for $25,000 that today are valued in the millions and passed down through the generations. It we don’t talk about it, it never happened.
To quote Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth!”
The 1921 massacre of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is a prime example. A Black shoeshine boy accidentally stepped on the foot of a white female elevator operator and whites, most of whom were not as financially well off as the members of that African American enclave, burned it to the ground, murdered dozens and buried them in mass graves. Not a trace of the once thriving community exists today. Worse, most whites born after the massacre never knew it happened. My friend, who as I said is from Tulsa, grew up and was educated there and was never taught anything about it. She found out just a few years ago when historians began telling the story and organizing commemorations.
The pattern when we tell our stories to the white hierarchy is:
You’re lying.
One we prove them, it’s “Why do you keep harping on that? Let it go.”
When we continue to tell our stories, it’s “Let’s ban books and discussions of the events and eventually the stories either disappear or are only told in the narrative perpetuated by the dominant class.”
It is for that reason that we must fight the Ron De Santises of the world. We must keep telling our stories loudly and proudly. For four hundred years we’ve been resilient and we have survived everything thrown at us. They can only forget our history if we shut up and let them.
I hope I answered my friend’s question.
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