Tulsa and more trauma

I'm disappointed that Deborah Peoples didn't win the runoff election for Ft Worth mayor. But I was hugely surprised that Steve "Junior" Ezeonu won a City Council election in Grand Prairie. He's a 22-year old immigrant from Nigeria, who ran as a progressive. I didn't think he could do it in such a conservative city, and I was pissed off that his Republican opponent sent flyers describing him as a "radical" leftist candidate. Congrats to Junior on his win!

Meanwhile I watched the PBS documentary about the Tulsa Race Massacre The Fire and the Forgotten. Mostly filmed in 2020, it focused on the effort to excavate mass grave sites and looked forward to the upcoming centennial anniversary. They also discussed issues around reparations and the way the interstate highway deliberately segregated the city to cut Blacks off from wealthy neighborhoods. The legacy of this racial divide manifests in the local police treating Black areas as "war zones" and killing citizens with impunity. Tulsa apparently removed "Black Lives Matter" when people painted it on the street like that street in Washington D.C. Not a good move.

All the talk of mass graves reminded me about Canada recently discovering a mass grave of children's bodies at an Indian boarding school. It's quite horrifying and shameful, but America too had tons of those boarding schools where Native children were taken from their families to be force-fed white culture and have their tribal identity erased, all in the name of assimilation into society. It was deeply harmful to so many children, and I recently learned there was a similar practice with aboriginal children in Australia. So many lost children.