Ol' Man River Tulsa Going Outward and the Tears

As a point of Causality treating others bad in that they just live within their means,
Who said you need it anyway. Low pay is low sales and all related to it.
Pushing for jobs that many poor can't reach cause all sorts of issues.
The job markets are changing going up but with no support for the workers
that can't afford those changes keeps the growth down.

Why are we heading for the 1900's again? Isn't it about time we all get brought up!
All of us! And so that BS that is against you should not be tolerated!

~~~~~If You Want To End Racism, Stop Forgiving Racists
We live in a moment of crises. Police continue to gun down and taser African-Americans. Whites have called 911 on blacks for something as routine as having too many coupons at the checkout or sitting in their own homes. The Department of Justice threw its weight behind states that have targeted black voters for disfranchisement and removed or blocked more than one million citizens from the ballot box. The Supreme Court followed up by sanctioning the massive voter purges in Ohio that violated federal law and also left in place Wisconsin’s extreme and racist partisan gerrymandering.

Meanwhile, white nationalists are proudly running for national office. Add to this President Donald Trump’s campaign of terror against asylum-seeking immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, reports of sexual abuse and torture of the children ripped away from their families and evidence that some of the records to reunite them were destroyed. No wonder so many Americans are asking, begging to know: How did we get here?

Forgiveness got us here.

Counterintuitive though it might sound, the American penchant for unconditional forgiveness is at the root of our present turmoil. We have tended to forgive those who waged the most sustained, brutal assaults in the name of white supremacy, without requiring them to repudiate their beliefs or actions in return. We have rationalized that forgiveness, that generosity, as “moving on” and as helping the nation to heal. But misusing forgiveness does neither.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-anderson-racists-forgiveness-trump_us_5b6356b4e4b0de86f49f4161

~~~~~How America's heartland loses black people
My life in Tulsa, like many other people who grew up in flyover cities, has been an assemblage, full of extended departures. Graduate school at Oxford, work in Egypt, work in Mexico, and now Harvard, management consulting and journalism have all taken me away from Tulsa.

But each time I landed in Tulsa’s two-terminal airport after countless connecting flights, a wave of nostalgia would warp Tulsa’s annoying pain points into loveable quirks.

Walking from my gate to the airport’s only five baggage carousels, I’d think to myself “there are Chick-Fil-A restaurants as far as the eye can see”, or I’d consider the fact that few restaurants were open beyond 10pm as indications of homeliness and family-friendly fun. I’d drive, smiling until my cheeks were sore, watching drivers trade in defensive driving for polite, graciously slow driving. And upon leaving on any one of these extended departures, an odd feeling remained that I’d be back one day – one day for good.

All I could recall were dozens of my classmates asking me: '​Aren’t you from Oklahoma? Are there really black people in Oklahoma?'
But on my most recent trip to Tulsa in May, Terence Crutcher’s September 2016 death and the subsequent acquittal and reinstatement of the police officer who killed him still lingered in my head. All I could recall were the dozens of my classmates who had heard about Terence’s murder asking me: “Aren’t you from Oklahoma? Are there really black people in Oklahoma?”

I could no longer muster the optimism to view these pain points as anything but painful, and the notion that I’d be back for good one day seemed ever so distant.

On 9 May, the Tulsa public school board voted 4-3 to change the name of Robert E Lee Elementary School to retain Robert’s last name, Lee. If you’re not familiar, Lee was a legendary leader in the Confederate army, which fought to retain the rights of Americans to enslave people.

Oklahoma wasn’t part of the Confederacy and as such, there can’t be any true nostalgia for the glory days when blacks were considered three-fifths of a person.

Once the school board reached its conclusion, the tension was palpable and it extended far beyond the reaches of that room. And those tension-induced tears dripping down the superintendent Deborah Gist’s cheeks felt like antagonistic and disingenuous demonstrations of sympathy or maybe guilt for what had happened. And the school districts’s most recent efforts to more fully change the name ring as misguided attempts to right a wrong that never should have been. The hung heads of the minority of school board members with the courage to resist such an unclever placation represented the weighty burden of having to remind the world that Tulsa does have black people and cares about them. .

After that school board vote, I started to look at everything I formally touted and appreciated quite differently.

As a former Tulsa apologist, I’d dutifully read the annual report of Tulsa’s Future, “an ongoing public-private regional economic development plan led by the Tulsa regional chamber”. The group has goals such as creation of jobs with roughly half of those new jobs with wages above $50,000 and generating capital investments in excess of $1bn for new and expanding projects.

But right after the letter to investors, there sat nearly three pages of pictures of the board – and not one person shared my skin’s hue. I had to wonder, who is representing my and my people’s experiences on this committee? Who’s there to ensure that a representative share of those jobs go to people who look like me? Or who will stand up and decry when those billion dollars in capital investment aren’t invested in areas where black people, like me, live?

Later that week, during a lively First Friday full of art, music and food, I walked around Tulsa’s Arts District, which until relatively recently was called the Tulsa Brady Arts District, named after a former wealthy magnate and known racist. When I left on my first of extended departures, the Arts District felt eerily vacant. It sat next to Greenwood Avenue, which was the main hub of Black Wall Street, a portion of Tulsa that pre-its 1921 race riot represented the then zenith of black accomplishment and wealth in segregated Tulsa.

People avoided Brady, not because it was dangerous but because there was nothing there. Now it’s teeming with a startup incubator, numerous refurbished concert halls and transplants from other cities frequenting the district’s art galleries and bars. But as I walked in that area, the feeling of being a speck of pepper amid a sea of salt became overwhelming. I wondered if anyone around me felt bad that little kids, black, brown and white alike, would walk into a building pseudo-named for a Confederate war hero.

I wondered if anyone around me felt bad that little kids, black, brown​​ and white alike, would walk into a building pseudo-named for a ​​Confederate war hero
I knew from that day on, my life in Tulsa, should I ever have one again, would be lived as an agitator. Representation on that Tulsa’s Future board by anyone would disrupt the white homophily. We’d be agitating just to have a voice – an understanding that our lives matter just as much as anyone else’s. Agitating to ensure that prospective investors who would eventually receive that Tulsa’s Future’s packet know that there are in fact black people here and that these reminders wouldn’t be relegated to the fatal results of police incidents that claimed the lives of Terence Crutcher, Joshua Barre and Eric Harris.

So while at first my anger was informed simply by another occurrence of black folks not mattering in that school board meeting, I realized that Tulsa and its leadership, like the leadership of these cities that are on their way back to relevance, bent on recruitment love – people with similar skin tones, backgrounds and even perspectives.

What really angered me was that the composition of Tulsa’s cast of leaders looked nothing like me and that its black leaders are relegated to the margin.

Not changing Robert E Lee completely to something else didn’t bother me nearly as much as the realization that every black child in Tulsa attending Tulsa public schools must now negotiate learning in the midst of a school system and a leadership too feckless to put asunder the dark racial history of our country’s past.

And in all of that, I’ve watched Tulsa try to recruit people who look like me. Not too long before the events of that school board meeting, my fellow black Tulsans who still lived there sent text messages asking about “Dream Tulsa”. They were looking for me and others to send word that Tulsa was “bringing a group of black entrepreneurs and innovators from around the nation”.

At first, the notion of attracting black people to Tulsa with all that rested on its shoulders seemed a stretch too far. I thought: “How are they going to convince any black person to move there? I left and don’t want to go back – and I’m from there.”

What Tulsa is doing isn’t dissimilar from many other flyover cities trying to entice coastal elites to consider making places like it home. Promising close access to decision-makers, affordability and a town on the move, these cities offer these new recruits an opportunity to take Tulsa to its next level, whatever that may be. But how can a city that can’t change the name of a school to something that truly sheds the vestiges of its racist past expect to bring the sweeping progress a city like Tulsa needs?

Tulsa is building one of the country’s largest, privately funded parks (though its transit system’s accessibility might plague its efforts at inclusivity), benefits from a state that mandated universal pre-K before any other state, and just became home to Bob Dylan’s archives.

And amid the clamor of good, all I can hear is me stumbling over words when people ask me if I’m from Oklahoma. Even its recent achievement to raise taxes for teacher raises, came after 26 years without tax hikes and a public education system ranked 47th in funding.

Suddenly the quirkiness is just an assemblage of annoying factoids about the place that raised me. My once slighting appreciation for my one-terminal airport seems like an indicator of Tulsa’s satisfaction with an insufficient norm. Its 1921 race riot that wiped out Tulsa’s thriving black community called Black Wall Street seems not far removed.

The herculean efforts of the city to attract me and others like me just won’t be enough to encourage me to continue agitating, to constantly enter rooms as the only black guy, and to persistently question if my blackness makes me any less of a Tulsan.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/04/tulsa-oklahoma-future

***Note And those tension-induced tears dripping down the superintendent Deborah Gist’s cheeks felt like antagonistic and disingenuous demonstrations of sympathy or maybe guilt for what had happened."

I am sure it's just stress as her job is stressful being the economic situation on the poor
and of the kids in Tulsa. Tulsa is a war zone now! It had nothing to do with racism 
being her education level and not a living in a home with a Confederate flag in front.
She is not bad being by default high up in education you just know more and why 
things are as they are so it's just stress from all being a mess that can't really
be changed the economic situation in Tulsa.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/dan-rodricks-blog/bs-md-rodricks-0816-story.html

You can't go forward in education and make those changes in education fairly as
long as you get those people like in small towns don't want to grow thus noting
why they vote against their best interest not being able to take care of their family.
They like it that way they like to suffer! Those types are out there holding 
others back! Changes don't happen overnight and so is ok because it will in time 
or it will end in a natural selection wiping out the bad voting habits by 
default from having nothing burning out! And also is the poverty holding it back.
People are not educated not for being lazy it's just they could not afford their 
education in the first place. Like having credit it takes money you have to buy 
something and if you only have a $1 in the bank you can't buy things!

So you see the stress in running the education system in a war zone of Tulsa!
Her tears was hers more likely! And is ok we are talking about Tulsa!!!!