The arc of history bends slowly towads justice The Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr
And it just bent a little bit more today. In a surprising decision, the nine member Oklahoma Supreme Court agreed to hear the Reparations case stemming from the 1921 Greenwood massacre, the community being better known at the time as Black Wall Street.
The two day massacre stemmed from, what else, a bullshit claim of a black man accosting a white woman. The reaction was furious, going so far as racist redneck farmers making Molotov cocktails, and then dropping them from their crop dusting planes into the streets. The inc event formed the basis for the hit HBO series, The Watchmen.
And for all this time, a brother and sister, both well over 100, and barely toddlers at the time, but who still remember the horror of those two days, have been fighting for justice. Not just personal justice, but justice for the black community that suffered so grievously from the slaughter. And these two don’t want money to stuff their pockets, they want reparations to rebuild the black community that was shattered by criminal white mob action.
After decades, the issue was assigned to an Oklahoma district court for trial. And in a typical redneck d*ck move, the district court judge threw the case out of court. His reason was what we’ve all come to expect, The event occurred more than 100 years ago, all of the miscreants are already long dead and buried, as are almost all of the victims, so reparations serve no purpose. Kind of like a half ass basketball referee deciding, No harm, no foul.
But now the Oklahoma state Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case, and the plaintiff’s request that the case be moved back to the district court for reconsideration. And at least one member of the court, a woman, seemed to be very amenable to the arguments of the plaintiff in calling for a full court hearing. That’s progress right there, and we shall have to wait and see what the outcome is.
But for the purposes of this article I want to concentrate on the initial judge’s ruling. Because it is the perfect encapsulation of the wider racist, GOP knee jerk response to any black appeals for reparations for the indignities suffered by black Americans under the ruthless thumb of their oppressors. It was a long time ago, and everybody is already dead, so what difference does it make? No harm, no foul. And the texture of that self serving bullsh*t is so rich that it could ensure bumper crops of corn in Illinois, Iowa and Kansas. And the pure hypocrisy of this argument is so toxic, you almost need to don a hazmat suit just to be around it.
Let me explain. The pain of a personal tragedy never goes away, and wrong is always wrong, no matter how long ago it occurred. My family lost a great, great uncle on the Arizona, and my uncle in an army jeep accident in Germany, and none of them have ever been forgotten, and the pain has never truly gone way at their loss. You all have your own family personal stories of family members lost long before their time, and they are revered and honored.
And it’s even worse for African American families. because their losses were not due to fate, or the vagaries of chance, their personal historical tragedies were the pure result of malicious, overt racism, not because of who they were, but what they were. They were sub humans, not worth the simple dignities of other human beings. They were disposable.
Which is unutterable bullsh*t. No human being is disposable, nor subject to the capricious whims of another. And from the days of slavery forward, none of the families have ever considered those tortured souls as disposable, their names and stories have lived through the generations, their names an honored part of every family history. For these people, the injustice will never end.
And if there’s anybody who should understand that, it’s the racist redneck f*cks who rained that misery down on them in the first place. And that’s where the almost mind numbing hypocrisy comes in.
In the 1850-60’s, a rabble of seditionist racists went to war against the government of the United States, purely for the purpose of allowing them to continue to abuse slaves rather than doing any actual work themselves. And after long years of brutal civil war, they got their scrawny asses righteously kicked. They lost!
And what happened next? The rightful government of the United States announced the Great Reconstruction, a program to help rebuild the South after the senseless destruction of the Civil War. And what happened next? The rednecks and peckerwoods lost their collective sh*t.
They immediately renamed the Civil War into the War of Northern Aggression. In one fell swoop, they magically became the victims! And while the US government tried to rebuild them, they emotionally retreated into a whimsical version of the Antebellum South, a totally fictional revision of white southern history that never actually existed. The nonsensical South that spawned Gone With The Wind. It almost seems like a laundry detergent commercial, Makes whites whiter, makes colored brighter!
And here lies the true tragedy of the misguided government attempt at Reconstruction. In my life I have been all over the beautiful country of Germany. And in all of my travels I have never seen even one statue or monument to the fascist thugs that brought Germany to ruin. When my family went to Dachau, we had trouble finding a local who could give us direction. They are ashamed to even admit that the place exists.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the rednecks put up monuments and statues honoring the traitors of the Republic. Their birthdays became “national” holidays in the South. Those statues and monuments should have been torn down and dynamited during the Reconstruction when the government had the chance. After all, losers don’t get the chance to anoint their seditionist patron saints. They were traitors.
So here we have it. On the one hand we have an oppressed people who were brought over in chains, and slept on planks on the ships, which became an obscene frat pledge game, and continued to be chained and abused for more than 100 years. And were so abused that their forebears are literally family martyrs, and on the other hand, we have their oppressors, who beat, enslaved, and killed them, separating families from their babies like Trump’s border policy. And on the other side you have a tribe of seditionist traitors who have created their own fantasy world, and want to impose it on the rest of us.
And here’s the McGuffin. Due to the fact that most of these atrocities took place in the deep South, and inj deep red states, it’s the racist seditionist judges that get to decide what qualified as justice for the previously enslaved people. There is something seriously f*cfked up about our judicial system.
I thank you for the privilege of your time.
