I think that most of us would agree that it is no fun having to admit when we are wrong but I think that even more embarrassing is realizing how much there is that I don’t know.
It pains me to admit this but before this year I’m not sure that I’d ever heard of “Loving Day” or paid it much attention if I did. June 12th marks the day in 1967 that the Supreme Court ruled on Loving v Virginia, the day that bans on inter-racial couples were struck down. I knew about the case, knew the story of Richard and Mildred Loving and what they went through, knew how monumental a ruling it was and know several inter-racial couples but somehow never considered that there was a day celebrating it. How did I not know?
I also didn’t know about June 19, Junteenth. This is the day that the Emancipation Proclamation was read publicly in Texas in 1865, two full years after it was issued. Texas was the last state to be emancipated and the date is considered a celebration of the end of slavery in America. He’s since changed the date but if Donald Trump hadn’t originally chosen it for his first big campaign rally in months I probably wouldn’t have known.
I also wouldn’t have know about Tulsa, Oklahoma and the horrific massacre there if he hadn’t chosen that as the city. June 1st was the 99th anniversary of a white mob burning 35 blocks of businesses and 1200 homes in the Greenwood section of Tulsa, an affluent black neighborhood that was known as “Black Wall Street.” After a young man was accused of assaulting a young white girl and rumors of a lynching spread a confrontation at the courthouse ended in gunfire and twelve people dead, ten of them white. Rioters stormed Greenwood and kerosene bombs were dropped from private planes. There are massive discrepancies in the tally of dead, from 36 to 300, but by the time the National Guard was able to bring things under control the weekend had left 10,000 people homeless. I never read about that in a history book.
Since the 1970’s February has been “Black History Month”, a progression from something called “Negro History Week” that started in 1926 to revolve around the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln on February 2nd and Frederick Douglass on the 14th. This month is “Pride Month”, a commemoration of the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village, Manhattan in June, 1969 when another group of disenfranchised people decided that they had had enough of prejudice and police harassment and an ugly situation eventually led to positive change.
If it seems like I am tip-toeing around some political issues here, the reason for that is that I am. My purpose as I sit down to tap out these words is to encourage you to educate yourself, to leave here and google the Tulsa Massacre or the Stonewall Riots and read about things that you may not have known about that have happened in this country. Morgan Freeman doesn’t think that Black History Month should be a thing because “black history is American history” and I think that he’s right.
Another thing that I’ve been made aware of recently is the term “slacktivism”, the practice of wanna be do-gooders that talk a good game on social media, that change their profile pictures to little rainbow frames every June or share memes explaining why “black lives matter” doesn’t mean that others don’t and fight with their older relatives who may not fully understand that they are, in fact, racist.
I get it, and I know that it’s hard to argue with trolls that accuse me of it. I don’t know the answer to what I should be doing if I really want to be an ally, but it strikes me that you can never go wrong with education. There is a shit load of things that have happened in this country that I don’t know about and that makes me think that there are probably a shit load of things that you don’t know about.
Maybe learning about those things is a good first step?
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Previously Published on thirstydaddy.com
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Photo by Joshua Koblin on Unsplash
Well said Jeremy. Thanks for sharing!