The memory of the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 will survive even Joe Biden’s banalities about it, but Americans’ understanding of race will continue to suffer from his malign “equity” policies. Completely ignored is the connection between Biden equity politics and the race-hustling grifters that sought to cash in on the remembrance.
The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission had scheduled a program including singer John Legend and Georgia voting rights activist Stacey Abrams and featuring three survivors of the carnage. But attorneys for the survivors suddenly insisted on $1 million for each of three survivors, now of course over 100 years old, and $50 million in reparations, among other demands.
The commission had previously approved $100,000 payments for each survivor but threw up its hands at the last-minute demands. It canceled all the festivities rather than capitulate to this outrage.
This disgraceful turn of events was well-reported by establishment media, but they didn’t dare equate the grifter race hustlers and Biden’s equity politics. What the con-job amateurs couldn’t do, Big Guy Biden can get away with. Really political people like Putin get this, but the American establishment doesn’t.
Biden’s speech noted the silence about the massacre but overlooked the parallels between the events of a century ago and the establishment silence over the past year’s BLM “mostly peaceful” riots. Both cover-ups reward respective political interests.
Today, in yet another racial cover-up, Biden and his minions condemn anti-Asian violence but refuse to identify the perpetrators as black. They even resort to depicting the Atlanta brothel murders as anti-Asian crimes. This is a remembrance for a partisan purpose, a memory hole of distortion.
Biden recounted two horrific days—rumors leading to spontaneous murders of entire families, executed elderly men and women, aerial bombardment of the black section of the city, the razing of a flourishing albeit racially segregated community, and mass graves. I would add that the father of the eminent historian John Hope Franklin was a Tulsa survivor.
As he narrated this lamentable history, Biden engaged, as he often does, in Catholic privileging, resorting to his Jefferson Bible version of Catholicism to ornament his views. He recounts the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan, which emphasized anti-Catholicism, so he can claim ancestral victimhood. The grim story can be found in the writings of Philip Hamburger.
One would think Biden would use the occasion to note charitable actions on the part of the local Catholic church, but this would have disrupted his narrative of white barbarity: “According to an article published by the Tulsa Tribune on June 6, 1921, the Cathedral’s nuns, its ladies of the St. Vincent de Paul Society and its Knights of Columbus provided food, clothing, and shelter to 400 black victims of the riot. Twenty-five babies were bathed and given clean clothes.” There must have been other acts of love and compassion as well, but no reason to recount them if they don’t contribute to white guilt.
Lamentably, one persistent legacy of the second KKK was the 34-year Supreme Court career of Justice Hugo Black, a committed Klansman and a Franklin Roosevelt appointee. The former Alabama politician left an anti-Catholic legacy with his peculiar understanding of “separation of church and state” (a Klan slogan, incidentally). Black’s most faithful adherent on the court today is Obama-Biden appointee and nominal Catholic Sonia Sotomayor, who practically reduces freedom of religion to freedom of worship. While Biden noted attacks on Catholics and other immigrant faithful as well, including Jews, he might have added older sects such as Mormons and Quakers, without undermining his focus on Tulsa.
Biden reached his rhetorical high point when he concluded, “great nations . . . come to terms with their dark sides.” He added, “The only way to build a common ground is to truly repair and to rebuild.” Indeed, we should follow Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s advice (and Abraham Lincoln’s) on repentance.
But immediately Biden descended into partisan rage and bathetic blather. “And at some point, there will be a reckoning, an inflection point, like we’re facing right now as a nation” (emphasis added). Reconciliation might take the path of exhuming massacre victims buried in mass graves for reburial and thus confer some dignity. In the meantime, one might cease exhuming the bodies of Confederate soldiers and their wives. But Biden demands his audience identify those who oppose him today with the Tulsa murderers of a century ago and with the regime of slavery.
His speech spewed hatred, making persuasion and consensus impossible. He would promote an unrecognizable America: “we’ve allowed a narrowed, cramped view of the promise of this nation to fester—the view that America is a zero-sum game where there is only one winner. ‘If you succeed, I fail.’” Globalist trade policies, open borders, “equity,” political correctness, pointless wars—defending your rights makes you a racist in Biden’s America.
Naturally, Biden repeated the Charlottesville canard and the January 6 nonsense, even attributing to a survivor the equation of the “insurrection” with the race massacre of 1921. Biden is consciously inciting a remembrance of revenge—equity doesn’t mean equality, it means getting even. In the speech, he even justified this in ethnic terms: “we [Irish] have a little chip on our shoulder. A little bit, sometimes.” A lot, often. His Irish identity is his own version of anti-white privilege—19th-century Gangs of New York tribalism brought up to date.
Biden even singled out, though not by name, Senators Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), allegedly “two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends,” thereby strengthening their opposition to his extremism. Fair housing legislation, small business assistance, and above all voting rights, in Biden’s view, are at risk from the forces of darkness and division.
For all this anti-white posturing, Biden even wound up belittling black achievements: “the data shows young black entrepreneurs are just as capable of succeeding, given the chance, as white entrepreneurs are. But they don’t have lawyers. They don’t have—they—they don’t have accountants, but they have great ideas.” More nonsense. For one, the black lawyers who tried to shake down the Tulsa Commission for millions of dollars certainly had some “great ideas.” There are far too many lawyers—the problem of the administrative state—who stifle innovation. Ultimately, Biden and the Democrats want blacks to become dependent on the administrative state. Recall that Lincoln defined slavery as “you work, and I eat.” –
Biden concluded, as he often does, with a line from Seamus Heaney: “History teaches us not to hope on this side of the grave, but then, once in a lifetime, the longed-for tidal wave of justice rises up, and hope and history rhyme.” Like Marx, Lenin, or Mao, Biden sees human history as driven by will and hope, akin to religious fanaticism. The poet who lives in a dream world is our guide. Real history would scatter the 1619 fantasies and replace them with 1776 Commission scholarship.
In this way Biden is far more dangerous than Franklin Roosevelt, who made partisan hatred the basis for the modern Democratic Party. FDR even compared conservative Republicans with fascists in his 1944 State of the Union Address. Harry Truman continued in the same vein. FDR knew that plagiarists and useful idiots such as Biden would follow suit, with racism taking the place of fascism. The stupid party must know this history of their triumphant enemies in the evil party, and then become acquainted with the history of their own party, restore equality as a self-evident truth, and take up the work of freeing America from the new slavery of Wokeness and equity .