History: it's whatever you want it to be!

In a magnanimous move, Oklahoma's superintendent of schools has agreed to allow teachers to talk about the Tulsa Massacre. You know, as long as they don't mention how motivated by racism it was.

No state motto huh? May I suggest:
"The Willful Ignorance State."

It was a great show, but I don't love that
we're learning more about our history from
HBO than we are from actual history classes.

Which is weird because it's usually referred to as the Tulsa race massacre, the Tulsa race riot--a misleading description since riots rarely involve air support--or the opening scene from the Watchman TV series. Speaking of, it's like super embarrassing for us, as a country I mean, that before HBO came a long, a lot of Americans had never heard about the time in 1921 when a white mob killed three hundred Black residents of Tulsa and burned thirty-six blocks of the city to the ground, right?

Pictured: Ryan Walters, seen here
taking time away from a very intense
beer pong tournament to rail against
the woke agenda and coastal elites.

Why, yes it is. I went to public school in the north so I'd a least heard about it before, although it was definitely framed as a "race riot" and relegated to footnote status at best. But you know what's even more embarrassing? This guy Ryan Walters, the aforementioned superintendent in charge of Oklahoma's schools who said last week that the Tulsa Race Massacre wasn't racially motivated despite it being right there in the name.

"...I would say you be judgmental of the issue, of the action, of the contest, of the character of the individual, absolutely. But let's not tie it to the skin color and say the skin color determined that..." 

-Ryan Walters, the guy somehow

in charge of education in Oklahoma

"Actually, suggesting that race was a factor 
kinda makes you racist against white people."

-Walters's argument

Look, I'm not an historian, but should we absolutely tie the Tulsa massacre to racism. And I say this because violent goons who half-heard a garbled story about a white guy who thinks he might have seen a Black nineteen-year accidentally step on a white girl's toe as he boarded an elevator, took this as just cause to murder hundreds of innocent people and set Tulsa on fire leaving ten thousand people homeless, were absolutely motivated by race hatred and saying otherwise is dishonest and dangerous, Ryan.

I mean, it's not exactly off-brand for a sad chapter in American history to have its basis in racism. In fact, I think most of our sad chapters have their basis in racism. At least the ones that aren't rooted in misogyny. Or homophobia. Or transphobia, or xenophobia--you know, it's starting to sound like a lot of our problems can be traced back to white guys being dicks. Wait, you don't suppose that's why white guys like Walters, who are themselves dicks, don't want anyone talking about it, do you?

 Pictured: that time the U.S. government forced tens of thousands of
people at gun point off their land for completely non-racist reasons.

-Oklahoma schools