Thoughts on Tulsa and History.

Something good (Jesus Christ we need something, anything, good!) to come out of this horror show contemporary American life has become is that everyone is talking about history. There’s exasperation in it, but I’ll admit also to a certain amount of satisfaction for those of us who love and study history.

Most people don’t know about Tulsa and Tuskegee. Don’t know about the Upstairs Lounge. Don’t know about Wounded Knee. That is because history has been erased and hidden. By people who don’t want us to know it.

I think there are people who at some point in their lives have had an epiphany about history and their knowledge of it — a realization that a vast amount of it has been deliberately and systematically kept from them — and there are people who have not. It feels like a bright light is suddenly focused on the fact that this is an intentional project carried out over centuries. I hesitate to use the word conspiracy because it’s not as if history had a secret meeting and decided — which is not to say that pieces of it have not involved conspiracies; sometimes in the dark of night, like the removal of dead bodies from Greenwood, and sometimes in broad daylight, like the Texas State Board of Education’s influence on textbook publishers — but if history is not a conspiracy it operates like one.

You realize that the writing of history is always, completely, myth-making, a process which has many motivations but in the end they just add up to the old saw that history is written by the victors. Not just written by the victors, but written by the victors in order to keep the vanquished vanquished. Hundreds, thousands, of people over time have made hundreds, thousands of decisions to tell a story this way and not that way, to tell this story and not that story, to exaggerate this one, hide that one, tell this truth, tell that lie. Out of a fear of justice, if not retribution. Because knowing our history makes us angry. And powerful. And demanding.

Learning, in a college class when we read the Martin Sherman play Bent, that homosexual men were imprisoned and killed in the Nazi camps was that moment for me. Once I knew that, my life of reading and listening and learning has been a lifelong project of uncovering more, about gay history, about Black history, women’s history, and on and on. Can learning about Tulsa be that moment for America?