{"id":12320,"date":"2020-06-22T12:24:04","date_gmt":"2020-06-22T16:24:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=12320"},"modified":"2020-06-22T12:24:04","modified_gmt":"2020-06-22T16:24:04","slug":"catching-up-on-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=12320","title":{"rendered":"Catching-up on history"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’d never heard of Juneteenth, or the Tulsa riots of 1921, until the flap surrounding the First Felon’s campaign rally. So, naturally, I did what I always do when I want to learn about something: I went to the Barnes & Noble Website and began browsing books. Searching on “Tulsa 1921<\/a>” called-up a list of just four reportorial-style accounts, a novel, a family memoir, and two knock-off copies of a report by an Oklahoma state commission.<\/p>\n

Of the four reportorial-style histories, three<\/I> are from academic presses and one is from a mainstream publisher. The books from academic presses are probably exhaustive accounts but poorly written in the passive voice, and the one from the mainstream publisher is probably well-written but not so exhaustively researched. The best selling of the group is from the mainstream publisher, but hundreds of places down the list; I assume, but have no way to confirm, that relevant titles are spiking just now and that all these titles ordinarily inhabit the sub-basement.<\/p>\n

Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood<\/i>, published in 1966 — more than 50-years ago — outsells all of them.<\/p>\n

The bottom line here: Nobody — in white America, at least — cares a hoot about the murder of 300-blacks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, or the incineration of thousands of homes.<\/p>\n

As I remarked a few years ago<\/a> when Black Lives Matter first made an appearance:<\/p>\n

\n

As most longtime readers know, my first freelance pieces were true crime features for the old tabloid crime rags, and one of the very first things I learned is that features about black people killing each other are not salable. I tried. If a scary-looking minority rapes and kills a white Sunday School teacher its a story; if a scary-looking minority rapes and kills a black Sunday School teacher it\u2019s \u2026 too bad. That\u2019s the bald commercial fact.<\/p>\n

If you doubt that, just visit the true crime section of your local Barnes & Noble store, or scan Ann Rule\u2019s or Joe McGinniss\u2019 or Gregg Olsen\u2019s output: No black people. Check the televised true-crime shows, too; No black people.<\/p>\n

So, make no mistake: blacks do have a legitimate grievance; white America isn\u2019t very interested in black lives or deaths.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The outright hagiography of George Floyd is certainly misplaced and perhaps even counter-productive, but our recent, heightened attention to race issues is not misguided.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’d never heard of Juneteenth, or the Tulsa riots of 1921, until the flap surrounding the First Felon’s campaign rally. So, naturally, I did what I always do when I want to learn about something: I went to the Barnes … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12320"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12320"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12323,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12320\/revisions\/12323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}