The Tragedy of Black Wall Street
100 years ago, Greenwood, Oklahoma proved success knows no skin color and envy and hatred know no bounds.
Ten days from today marks the centennial of an interesting history story. It is a story horrifically tragic on an epidemic scale, a story of racial division so great as to lead to mass murder - but the underlying history is enlightening as well, a salutary example of a history that proves success knows no skin color, it does not care if you are black, white, brown, yellow or purple.
Just Google “Greenwood, Oklahoma”, the “Greenwood Massacre” or the “Tulsa Race Riots of 1921”.
The Greenwood District of Tulsa was known as the Black Wall Street. Read and learn a story of envy so deep it masqueraded as racial hatred and lead to over 300 black citizens being killed - but also learn that success, civic pride, and prosperity cannot be stopped if people adopt successful cultural behaviors. Not even 400 years of systemic racism can stop it. Perhaps the progressive leaders of our major cities could take a lesson from Greenwood.
Of course, due to the societal conventions at the time, Greenwood was a segregated black community – but it should be noted that it was a mirror image of white Tulsa. According to the History Channel, “… the area had been considered one of the most affluent African American communities in the United States for the early part of the 20th century.”
Given our changed society and the integration of 2021, why is it impossible to think that black Americans cannot succeed?
BLM, the Critical Race charlatans and the 1619 revisionist historians reduce every ill black Americans have ever suffered was caused by "400 years of systemic racism" - every single one. To make that claim, one must ignore that whites faced some of the same economic deprivation as blacks – in gross numbers, there are more white poor than black poor).
There was a guy from Baltimore on Tucker Carlson’s show back in 2019 who said the following things were caused by 400 years of systemic racism:
High murder rate
13 of 39 high schools with not a single child proficient in math
Housing issues
High unemployment
Rat infestation
His answer to Tucker's "What should be done?" question:
Send us more money.
I kid you not. Nobody in Baltimore is responsible because, of course, "400 years of systemic racism."
Kind of tells you how Baltimore got to where it is today, especially if this gentleman is representative of the city's leadership.
In my opinion, it is clearly not “systemic racism”. It is not for a lack of federal welfare programs – quite the contrary – federal programs have destroyed black America. If Greenwood and its citizens flourished in the Jim Crow days of the early 1900’s and the rampant racism that even reached the White House in 1919 in the form of the Democrat president Woodrow Wilson, why not today?
If the residents of 1900’s Greenwood succeeded without a massive welfare state in such a harsh national environment, why can’t black Americans succeed in 2021 after a century of change? That is a question that should be put to every member of Black Lives Matter.
American history proves that if any race, creed, or national origin models the behaviors of capitalist Western culture, they will succeed. In America today, progressives tell us that slavery is responsible for the economic situation of black Americans while other minorities who have escaped similar situations come to America and find success – as a group, Asians have a higher median family income than whites (by almost $18,000 a year) and people of Indian, Taiwanese, Filipino, people of Australian and Israeli heritage all earn more than Americans of European heritage. Even in the face of this information, Americans are told that white people are still responsible for the plight of, and owe reparations to, the black community due to an institution that was ended a century and a half ago.
What is this magic formula for success?
Apparently, it is following a cultural model developed by those racist, sexist, heterosexual white males from northern Europe – but how can it be “white privilege” if people of color find success through it?
The answer is simple. It is that success is not “white”. Success is colorblind, but it does require adherence to a certain set of cultural rules – and by a country mile, western culture has proven to be the best vehicle to attain success for all races and sexes.