The defining issue of our politics in the 21st century? + Remembering the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921
Baseball brilliance + Upcoming events
Note to readers: The Platypus will be digging into its burrow this summer (platypuses are notoriously seasonal writers), so our publishing schedule will be occasional rather than weekly.
We usually think about big topics like rising authoritarianism, climate change, and immigration separately. But what if they are now fatefully linked in a way that will drive our politics in the coming decades? This issue of The Platypus features provocative readings that map the connections between these issues. One of the biggest questions we’ll face in this century is how to respond when millions of people seek refuge as floods, droughts, hurricanes, high temperatures, and declining crop yields make larger areas of the world unlivable.
Climate change will drive increasing numbers of people to flee the Global South and seek refuge in the Global North, exacerbating the pattern shown in the graphic above. Last year The New York Times published Abraham Lustgarten’s richly reported, compelling article on the topic, “The Great Climate Migration,” which showed how climate change is already a factor driving migrants from Central America north. Models of the impact of changing climates predict that under extreme climate scenarios 30 million people could migrate to the U.S. over the next 30 years. Lustgarten concludes his must-read piece with this warning:
The window for action is closing. The world can now expect that with every degree of temperature increase, roughly a billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. For a long time, the climate alarm has been sounded in terms of its economic toll, but now it can increasingly be counted in people harmed. The worst danger, Hinde warned on our walk, is believing that something so frail and ephemeral as a wall can ever be an effective shield against the tide of history. “If we don’t develop a different attitude,” he said, “we’re going to be like people in the lifeboat, beating on those that are trying to climb in.”
It is difficult to disentangle migration due to climate change from other causes such as war, poverty, and persecution. But these numbers give a sense of the dimensions of the current and future crisis:
The number of people officially classified as refugees (20.4 million) by the U.N. Commission for Refugees is smaller than the number who moved due to sudden weather events (21.5 million).
The World Bank projects that 143 million more people will move from the Global South because of climate change by 2050.
In his article “The Climate Crisis, Migration and Refugees,” John Podesta notes that “In 2017, 68.5 million migrants were forcibly displaced, more than at any time in human history. While it is difficult to estimate, approximately one-third of these (22.5 to 24 million people) were forced to move by “sudden onset” weather events – flooding, forest fires after droughts, and intensified storms.”
People from the Global South will experience the harshest effects of climate change, but, of course, they did not cause it. Columbia University law professor Michael Gerrard contends “America is the worst polluter in the history of the world. We should let climate refugees settle here.” He points out that between 1850 and 2011, the U.S. was responsible for 27% of the world’s carbon emissions, the EU 25%, China 11%, and Russia 8%.
Immigration panics are driving politics rightward, and the panics will multiply as climate migration accelerates. A gigantic corporate and military security state feeds on the fear by profiting from militarized borders. In Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration and Homeland Security, journalist Todd Miller visits military trade shows and talks to corporate and defense industry specialists. He concludes that
Those enriched by the politics of fossil fuel, money, and weapons seemed to want solutions, first and foremost, for how best to keep a world of more and more impoverished people either working for them or out of sight altogether. As environmental destabilization wields tremendous pressures on these people to survive, investments pour into weapons and surveillance systems as a way of perpetuating the current economic-political order (even as the order attempts to “green” itself). . .
There is a border in the Anthropocene era: young unarmed farmers with failing harvests encountering expanding and highly privatized border regimes of surveillance, guns and prisons . . . This is the 21st-century border that I examine in this chapter. It is a border that is not solely defined by an international boundary line, nor even the most imposing Trump-era wall, but rather by a multilayered enforcement apparatus covering a wide swath of territory, defined more by political and economic power than by national sovereignty. There are many components to this, including complex surveillance networks, biometrics and big data, militarized police agents, border policing strategies, and “consequence delivery systems,” to name a few elements of the totality of “border security.”
Nativism is driving people to extreme violence. After the mass murders in Christchurch and El Paso, the Washington Post reported
The unifying thread, analysts say, is the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which maintains that global elites are intentionally replacing Europe’s white majorities with immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa.
“The Great Replacement theory has become the master narrative for a vast number of far-right attacks,” said Neumann, the terrorism researcher. “It’s the narrative that connects them all.”
And, as the Anti-Defamation League has reported, FOX News hosts like Laura Ingrahm, Jeanine Pirro, and Tucker Carlson among many others have attempted to bring this once-fringe conspiracy theory into the mainstream.
Liberal and left parties throughout the west have struggled to find their footing about the prospect of vastly greater migration. A number of European left parties have tacked right, arguing for restriction, as David Adler describes in his Nation article “Meet Europe’s Left Nationalists.”
The rise of these left-nationalist leaders marks a momentous turn against free movement in Europe, where it has long been accepted as a basic right of citizenship.
Forget The Communist Manifesto’s refrain that “the working men have no country”; the new face of the European left takes a radically different view. Free movement is, to quote Wagenknecht, “the opposite of what is left-wing”: It encourages exploitation, erodes community, and denies popular sovereignty. To advocate open borders, in this view, is to oppose the interests of the working class.
By popularizing this argument, these new movements are not just challenging migration policy in Europe; they are redefining the boundaries of left politics in a dangerous, and inopportune, direction.
In Austria, the Green Party entered into a disastrous “Green-Brown” alliance with a neo-fascist Party. The possibility that we could see a politics of generous social welfare and green policies mixed with brutal racism and sealed borders is emerging.
However, it turns out that moving right on immigration is a disastrous electoral strategy. In the Washington Post, Tarik Abou-Chadi explains “Why Germany – and Europe – can’t afford to accommodate the radical right”:
In a joint research project, Denis Cohen, Werner Krause and I investigated the effects of accommodating radical-right parties for more than a dozen Western European countries since the 1990s. Our recent working paper, which combines election study data on vote switching with data on party positions, finds no evidence that the radical-right vote share is reduced when established parties choose more anti-immigrant positions. If anything, the radical right is the net winner of the intensified competition over the same pool of voters.
This is supported by research showing that, when mainstream parties emphasize topics and employ frames that are associated with the radical right, they bring more attention to these topics — attention that generally benefits the very parties they seek to defeat. For example, radical-right parties benefit from higher attention to the issue of immigration, especially if voters see it through a frame of security. This means that established parties that accommodate the positions and rhetoric of the radical right actually bring them into the mainstream. This legitimization allows the radical right to appeal to new segments of the electorate and takes away the social stigma associated with activism on its behalf.
It might be tempting for establishment parties to believe the only way to defeat the radical right is to shift away from centrist and progressive positions. But calls to counter its rise with more authoritarian and nationalist positions are misguided. The hard truth is that short-term policy shifts are unlikely to weaken radical-right parties such as the AfD [Alternative für Deutschland, the far-right, nationalist party in Germany].
The most interesting (partial) counterexample to the nativist turn in the west is Germany, which perhaps because of its history confronting its past, acted boldly to welcome 1.2 million Syrians. A must-read new article by Thomas Rogers “Welcome to Germany” in the New York Review of Books assesses the results and finds that
Just before his inauguration in early 2017, President-elect Trump said it was a “catastrophic mistake” for Merkel to have taken in “all of those illegals.”
Now, more than five years after the refugee crisis, the apocalyptic predictions have not materialized. According to numbers released last summer, the migrants from that period have integrated faster than previous refugee influxes. Approximately half of them have jobs, and another 50,000 are taking part in apprenticeship programs. The federal education minister has stated that more than 10,000 are enrolled in university. Three quarters of them now live in their own apartment or house and feel “welcome” or “very welcome” in Germany. The financial cost to the German government of taking in the migrants—including housing, food, and education—is likely to be recovered, in taxes, earlier than many had predicted.. . .
The shortcomings of the official system have been partly alleviated by an unprecedented outpouring of civic and corporate engagement. According to the Federal Family Ministry, more than half of all Germans have worked in some way to help the migrants since 2015 by offering language courses, donated clothes, or other free services—a torrent of support initially known as Willkommenskultur, or “welcome culture.”
Every system of domination does, of course, generate its own antagonists. In Storming the Wall, Todd Miller quotes Angela Y. Davis, who visited a refugee camp in Germany in 2015 and declared, “the refugee movement is the movement of the 21st century. It’s the movement that’s challenging the effects of global capitalism, and it’s the movement that’s calling for civil rights for all human beings.”
In his Common Dreams piece “Immigrants Are Essential: A Manifesto for the Covid-19 and Climate Change Era,” Saket Soni writes
Just as properly addressing the needs of essential workers could make immigration status the least salient fact of their lives rather than the most, properly planning for climate refugees can make them an integral part of a just immigration system, rather than a series of crises to be managed.
The U.S. needs a reform as sweeping as the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which eliminated racist immigration quotas, allowing millions of talented people to find a home here and build new lives. A visionary climate justice movement must ensure that our country's immigration policy, like our dams and bridges, is radically reconceived to meet a world on the move.
Ruth Milkman’s brilliant book Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat begins with a quote from Stuart Hall from 2007 that sums it up:
These people are doing the shit work of global capital: they are servicing it, feeding it, washing its windows late at night, cleaning its offices and looking after the children of the global entrepreneurs … DuBois once said, ‘The color line will be the central problem of the twentieth century.’ I think migration will be the central issue of the twenty-first century.”
Recommendations on the 100th Anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre
This Memorial Day, Monday, May 31st, and Tuesday, June 1st, mark the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, when a white mob rampaged through Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood, known as “Black Wall Street.” They deployed handguns, machine guns, and bombs dropped from airplanes to murder as many as 300, level 35 city blocks, and leave some 8,000 Black Tulsans homeless. White officials destroyed evidence of the massacre, and vigilantes threatened any who spoke out, suppressing the memory of this atrocity so effectively that even many Tulsans report being shocked when they learned about it only in adulthood or old age. The enormity of this state-sponsored crime, its near erasure from our nation’s story, and the fact that no survivor has ever received compensation call for special attention now, a year after the murder of George Floyd and just weeks after the House Judiciary Committee finally succeeded, after 30 years of trying, to approve H.R. 40. The bill calls not for reparations, but for a commission to study reparation proposals. It faces near-certain defeat in the Senate — all the more reason to view this centennial of the Tulsa Massacre as a “teachable moment” for America. Here are some things The Platypus recommends:
DeNeen L. Brown, Jonathan Silvers, and Eric Stover produced a new documentary, Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten, which premieres on PBS on May 31st on PBS. Visit www.pbs.org or check your local listings for times. https://www.pbs.org/video/tulsa-fire-and-forgotten-preview-s5vwka/
In a companion essay to the film, DeNeen L. Brown reminds us that Tulsa was far from the only city in which Blacks suffered pogroms in the early 20th century: “Red Summer: When Racist Mobs Ruled: How a pandemic of racial terror led to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre”
tulsasyllabus.com offers a huge array of resources for educators and anyone looking to learn more about the massacre.
Journalist Tim Madigan wrote an excellent article about the massacre entitled “American Terror” for Smithsonian Magazine. It distills the story from his new book The Burning: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.
Tulsa-born journalist Caleb Gayle wrote a cover story in this week’s New York Times Magazine: “100 Years After the Tulsa Massacre, What Does Justice Look Like?” It’s the best piece we’ve read on the issue of reparations for the massacre. The Justice for Greenwood Foundation, led by attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons, seeks “to compensate survivors and descendants of victims and survivors.” Solomon-Simmons himself is leading a lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs, employing the same legal strategy that forced Johnson & Johnson to pay $465 million “for contributing the opioid epidemic through the deceptive marketing of painkillers.” A competing camp, however, including “charities, private businesses and city leaders” has organized around the “1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Commission,” an organization with no board of directors that mainly seeks to build an “exhibit center” called Greenwood Rising. Many Tulsans view the commission with skepticism or contempt for its decision to not to call for reparations and its inclusion Republican Senator James Lankford, who was one of the first Senator to call on his peers to reject the certification of Joe Biden’s election — a position he recanted after the January 6th insurrection failed. The City Council member who represents Greenwood, Vanessa Hall-Harper said of the Commission, “It’s bullshit. . . . They want to gloss over what really happened.”
The New York Times also produced an impressive interactive exhibit with a 3-D reproduction of Greenwood: “What the Tulsa Race Massacre Destroyed.”
The 200-page 2001 Tulsa Race Riot Report remains a landmark in bringing the details of the massacre to light.
On May 7, Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute hosted a fascinating panel discussion entitled “Centenary of the Tulsa Race Massacre”
Maggie Astor of the New York Times provided another useful overview of the story in “What to Know About the Tulsa Greenwood Massacre.”
In 1993 filmmakers Sam Pollard and Joyce Brown produced Goin Back to T-Town, a documentary for American Experience on PBS that was hugely important in educating the public about the massacre.
Jelani Cobb reflects on the relationship between two grim bookends of the past century in his New Yorker essay “George Floyd, the Tulsa Massacre, and Memorial Days.”
Savvy Corner
Leading urbanist Cassim Shepard will be doing a talk entitled “Storytelling for Citymaking” at CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies on June 2 from 12:00 – 1:30 pm ET. “Urban change relies on strategic storytelling. Before designers, planners, advocates, and policymakers can intervene in urban space, they must learn the tools to observe and interpret urban dynamics and to build compelling narratives that reframe existing conditions.”
Documented NY will be hosting a session featuring several contributors to Immigration Matters: Movements, Visions, and Strategies for a Progressive Future. The event will be moderated by journalist Felipe De La Hoz and includes Ruth Milkman, Peter Markowitz, and Amaha Kassa. You can register here.
Delights and Provocations
Javier Baez of the Chicago Cubs performs sorcery on the Pittsburgh Pirates, stealing a run while making the Pittsburgh look like complete idiots. You can watch the play here.
In honor of the centennial of the Tula Race Massacre, our friend Bill Dempsey, a.k.a. DJ Dempsey, hosted a tribute to Tuslan musicians on his show Divino Maravilhoso. The show was live last night, but you can find it archived here. On Facebook, he wrote
I was never taught any of this in school, even in the first and only Black history class that was offered in college as an elective. Well into adulthood, on a long car drive, historian Kieran Taylor gave me a proper education, describing his research on the cover up of the 1919 Elaine, Arkansas race massacre, mentioning that it was one of many lead-ups to Tulsa.
This Saturday’s radio show salutes the work of Tulsans, like the Tulsa Race Massacre survivor and late great saxophonist, Hal Singer, whose family smuggled him out of town during the massacre. Hal passed last August, just shy of turning 101 after an amazing career writing and performing his own music, as well as backing up Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, fellow Okie Jay McShann and countless others. Like many Black Americans, Hal ultimately fled to Paris where he lived the last 50 years, named a Chevalier des Arts (Knight of the Arts) and then a Commandeur, an honor he shares with Stevie Wonder and T.S. Eliot, while most of us in the US are as clueless about his artistry as we are of the massacre that nearly killed him when he was a kid.
We’ll spotlight Hal and other famous Tulsans like J.W. Alexander without whom we’d never know who Sam Cooke was. J.W. heard teenage Sam singing gospel and signed him to his first recording contract, then urged Sam to branch out beyond gospel and formed one of the first black owned publishing and recording companies with Sam. J.W. did the same thing for Lou Rawls, Johnnie Taylor, Billy Preston and produced lots more at critical points like Bobby Womack, Solomon Burke and plenty of other artists. We’ll also spin some of the new record by Tulsan poet and musician Joy Harjo, recorded with Peter Buck on guitar.