Why Black Americans say both parties are failing them (audio)

Tulsa is gearing up for the centennial of the 1921 race massacre, a violent incident of racism that almost entirely destroyed the city’s Black community 100 years ago. The commemoration is putting a spotlight on Black Tulsans’ long, painful struggle toward racial equality – a struggle echoed throughout U.S. history in Black communities across the country. Coupled with a divisive presidential election in which race and racism are central issues, the sense among many Black voters in Tulsa is that neither party really has their interests at heart. 

“They feel it doesn’t matter either way, Republican or Democrat,” says Mareo Johnson, a local pastor and founder of Black Lives Matter Tulsa. “Nothing is going to change in my situation, my circumstance, my surroundings.” 

America understands the election primarily through partisan politics. Each side is claiming the soul of the nation is at stake. But what about the voters whom both parties have failed – not just today, but consistently and systematically, for generations? How do they decide whom to support? And where do they find hope? 

In this episode of “Rethinking the News,” we speak to Black Tulsans about their politics, and see what lessons the rest of the country can learn from the city’s struggle to find racial unity.

“Rethinking the News” is a podcast that aims to make room for constructive conversations across a range of perspectives, and bring Monitor journalism straight to your ears. To learn more about the podcast and find new episodes, please visit our page. 

This story was designed to be heard. We strongly encourage you to experience it with your ears, but we understand that is not an option for everybody. You can find the audio player above. For those who are unable to listen, we have provided a transcript of the story below.

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Samantha Laine Perfas: Welcome to “Rethinking the News,” a podcast by The Christian Science Monitor. Here, we create space for constructive conversations across a range of perspectives, to give you the information you need to come to your own conclusions.

I’m Samantha Laine Perfas, one of the producers. This is the second of three episodes we’re doing out of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa is preparing for the 100-year commemoration of one of the worst incidents of racist violence in U.S. history. In 1921, a group of white residents attacked the Black neighborhood of Greenwood in North Tulsa, burning and looting and killing. Some Black residents fought back. Many more fled the city. Tulsa’s white leadership, far from stopping the violence, either encouraged it or turned a blind eye. 

In the aftermath, the city government tried to put laws in place to make it harder for Black Tulsans to rebuild. They did eventually, but for years afterward, almost no one – Black or white – talked openly about the massacre. 

My colleague Jessica Mendoza and I went to Tulsa at the end of September to understand how Black Tulsans are wrestling with this history. In our previous episode, we heard the story of the massacre, and what it means to Tulsa residents today. If you haven’t yet, we encourage you to check it out. 

In this episode, hosted by Jess, we talk politics. It is, after all, an election year. But when your history is marked by such a huge failure of leadership – and when your lived experience today says those leaders, regardless of party, still are not

Audio montage: Robert Turner: This is not just a Democrat or Republican thing. You got racist people who vote for Democrats. You got racist folk who vote for Republicans. Ty Walker: I tell the Republican Party, you know, you’re no different than the Democrat Party because if the Democrat Party puts something in place that’s not really beneficial for the people, the Republicans don’t change it. They let it ride.Tiffany Crutcher: And it’s just crazy, but you know, I don’t know why we continue to vote for parties that don’t serve us well, that don’t serve our best interest. Mareo Johnson: A large majority of Black America, they feel it doesn’t matter either way, Republican or Democrat. ‘Nothing is going to change in my situation, my circumstance, my surroundings. Nothing is gonna change it.’Tiffany: I woke up with this eerie feeling. It was just a blah feeling. I couldn’t even put my finger on it. I wasn’t sick. It was Friday. My – my colleagues, they were like, ‘What’s going on with you? You’re not your bubbly self.’ And I said, ‘Well, nothing’s wrong.’ And I happened to pick up my phone and I pulled up a picture of me and Terence. And they said, ‘That’s a nice picture of Terence, what is he doing today?’ I said, ‘Well, he’s getting ready to start his first day of class.’ And that was that. Later that evening after I got off of work, I got a call from a cousin who lived in Dallas. And she said, ‘Have you called home? When was the last time you called home?’ I said, ‘It’s been maybe a day or two.’ And she got really quiet. I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ She said, ‘I think you should call home. And I said, ‘Spit it out. Something is wrong.’ She said, ‘It’s about Terence. I heard that he was shot and he’s dead.’ And my entire body went numb.Tiffany: Betty Shelby was indicted for first degree manslaughter within the week. And for the first time in the history of Tulsa, a police officer was indicted. For the first time in the history. And we thought we were making progress. They released a video, so we thought they were being transparent. I said, ‘It’s gonna be different this time. We’re gonna be different here in Tulsa.’Tiffany: She was acquitted of all charges. Acquitted but not exonerated, because the jury attached a letter to the verdict saying that, ‘We don’t believe that she’s blameless. She should never be a patrol officer again. But because of’ – and I’m paraphrasing – ‘because of how the law is written, we have to render this verdict.’ Tiffany: – I had to figure out a way to face the world.Tiffany: This is my lived experience. You know, just to give you a little bit more intel about my family, we’ve been through so much trauma. We’ve had every single issue hit us. Back in 2008, my oldest brother’s children, they were victims of gun violence. Leaving church, two o’clock. Broad daylight. Donovan, my oldest nephew, was only 16 years old, and he was hit 36 times. His brother, Adrion, was also 16. They were eleven months apart, he had just turned 16. The bullet went through a spinal cord, and paralyzed him from T7 down, never to walk again.My first cousin, Jeremy, was in the car. He was the church drummer. His right eye was shot out. And another cousin was hit in the stomach. Strict case of mistaken identity. They were riding in the same color and make car of gang members that these guys were looking for and they got the wrong little suburban kids. Fast forward, my oldest brother. Less than two years before Terence was killed, we lost him to stage four colon cancer at the age of 44. And then finally, I lose my twin to police brutality. And I said, I’m not going to lose this. Tiffany: The viable options are the Republicans and the Democrats. That’s all we have. And until we can do something different, we’re going to keep getting what we’re getting.Rev. Robert Turner: And while I’m out there, you know, I tell people: This is not about a political party or political agenda. The Democratic Party has done nothing to support what I do. Absolutely nothing. In fact, unfortunately, they’ve run away.Turner: This is, at its foundation, a spiritual movement. But it calls for physical, political remedies. If this is political, it’s just as political, or not more political, than Moses telling Pharaoh to let God’s people go. It means you have to emancipate your slaves, right? Turner: It’s not just one party, it’s not just Republicans. John Conyers for decades introduced H.R. 40, calling for a commission to study the effects of slavery and have reparations.Turner: It just shows you this is not just a Democrat or Republican thing.Turner: It requires a lot on this generation of white people. I give them that. I’ve heard similar sentiments, ‘Well, you know, it just feels like, you know, as a white man in America, we just under attack, we can’t do anything right. We’re the problem. We’ve done all this and it’s like we can’t catch a break.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m sorry that you have been able to benefit for the last 400 years. That whiteness has been the innocent victor in American culture for the last 400 years.’And I’m all for moving forward, but we need to digest and marinate on what we did to a group of people solely because — it wasn’t because Blacks were uneducated, it wasn’t because Blacks weren’t Christian — solely because they were Black. And we have not fully digested that yet. I’m all for moving forward, working together. But let’s understand where we come from.Ty Walker: We’re fighting things that happened in the past. I’m not discounting it. You know, I think it’s great. But at the end of the day is it really going to change the community’s economic situation?Ty: Wanda J is my mother. We’ve been around since 1974. I was eight years old, I believe, when she first started.Ty: Everything we do always comes back to economics. To pull people up the ladder is to change their economic situation. We keep saying government intervention is the key. And then we keep relying on somebody to say they’ll take care of you – and can’t no man take care of you. You have to learn to provide for yourself.Ty: I don’t want them to ever get caught up in labels because once you get caught up on the labels, name tags and things like that, guess what? You become that. But I teach them to be business women, and understand that you can be who you are regardless of the color of your skin.G.T. Bynum: I ran for mayor largely because I was so upset by the fact that studies showed that kids that grow up in the predominantly African American part of Tulsa are expected to live 11 years less than kids elsewhere in the city. That disparity is a symptom of many other things that we’re trying to focus on and address.Bynum: There are members of your family who have disappeared, and you have no idea where they are. And the response of the city government and of the leaders at the time is you need to just move on and get over it. And then we wonder why we have issues of racial division all these years later. And so I think we have a – just a fundamental human responsibility to the victims of this event to try and find their remains and allow them to have a proper burial, and for their families to know what happened to them.Bynum: The coalition that I built both to be elected and then to govern has not been partisan. I don’t even know the party makeup of our team in the mayor’s office. I don’t care. Political parties are very much focused on federal policy, and when it comes to city government, I don’t think either party has a monopoly on good ideas or hard work. Now I am a Republican, and in the time that I’ve been mayor, I routinely have Democrats tell me, ‘You’re the only Republican I’ve ever voted for,’ or ‘I can’t believe that you’re a Republican.’ And I always think that’s a shame, because the Republican Party, at least that I believe in, is focused on the individual and the liberty of the individual. And you can’t do that if you have individuals in your community that are being robbed of a decade of their life just because of the part of town that they happen to be growing up in. We have a responsibility to build a better community.Ted Johnson: Just about a quarter of Black Americans identify as conservative. Just over a quarter identify as progressive or liberal. And about 45 or so percent identify as moderate. So what this suggests is that Black folks span the spectrum of political ideologies just like every other race and ethnicity in the United States.Ted: It’s a bit odd for a Black guy from the South to be named after a rich white Republican from a century ago. But at the time that my grandfather was given this name by my great-grandparents – he was born in 1918 – it was standard practice for Black Americans to identify as Republican, to the extent that they could vote.Ted: What we see from the outset, from 1867 forward, are Black Americans voting for the same party.Ted: – the party of Abraham Lincoln, the party that championed the abolishment of slavery, the party that fought for the enfranchisement of Black freedmen after the Civil War. Ted: And as these Black folks in the South begin to spread out across the country, they change the politics of the states to where they move. So for a period from about 1930 through the 1950s, there is a pretty healthy competition for Black voters at the state and local level at various places around the country.Ted: He signs the order desegregating the federal workforce and desegregating the military. [Audio clip from British Pathé: “...Courageously, President Truman said, ‘We must make the government a friendly defender of the rights of all Americans. Again, I mean all Americans.’ …”]He does this because he recognizes if he can get Black voters in Illinois, Ohio, New York, New Jersey to support him, then he has a chance of winning the presidency. The strategy proved true.Ted: And so what we’ve seen over the sweep of American history are Black people voting in a bloc for the same party despite their political diversity, as a means of countering the electoral power of white racial conservatives, who would much rather the country pump its brakes on racial equality and racial integration.Ted: While my father is certainly more conservative, it’s the conservatism that leans on the belief that hard work, self-determination, individualism, education may not erase racism, but it gives you the best chance at success. And he also had a very strong sense of racial pride and racial identity, in that the government’s not going to be there for us, and so we have to learn to make our communities self-sustaining. Ted: She held a lot of those same beliefs about the importance of hard work and self-determination and education. But she believed it was the government’s responsibility to ensure our civil rights protections above all else. If they were falling short of that, we don’t let them off the hook by doing for ourselves. We demand even more stridently that they fulfill that.Ted: And so when every presidential election is essentially a single-issue election around which party is better at civil rights protections, then what Black voters lose is their political agency. They lose the ability to express themselves fully in the political arena on the range of issues that should be presented in elections. And they are robbed of that luxury by being forced to consider the party that will protect and extend civil rights, and the party that is looking to dial those rights back.And when people don’t – when they’re unable to exercise their political agency in full, they feel like they’ve been excluded from the nation. They feel like government is not responsive to their needs, that it’s not interested in what their community needs. And they see politics as nothing more than the pandering that happens every two or four years that may deliver election victories but doesn’t actually deliver change. Tiffany: I definitely don’t think that the Republican Party speaks to the Black needs of Tulsa. And as far as the Democratic Party, there’s racism within the Democratic Party as well. I do believe that our votes a lot of times are taken for granted, especially Black women. We come out and vote in droves, and we’re never afforded a seat at the table. And to me, that’s an illusion of inclusion. And so I don’t believe that our needs have been met by either party. I’m tired of politics as usual. I’m tired of negotiating with politics, if I live or die because of the color of my skin. Don’t we have the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Isn’t that the American way?Tiffany: Tulsa has a history of racially biased policing, evidenced by the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. The same police culture and state sanctioned violence that burnt down Greenwood is the same culture that killed my twin brother. Nothing has changed. They blamed the Black folks for the massacre. They blamed my twin brother for his own death. And so I often sit back and think about what my great-grandmother was thinking when a white mob came to burn down her community. I often sit back and wonder what she was thinking when she had to jump on the back of a truck and run. Then I think about what Terence was thinking when the helicopter was looming, saying that he looked like a bad dude. He wasn’t a fleeing felon. Terence needed help. But he got a bullet. And so this is the climate that we live in today. Nothing has changed.Tiffany: I’m simply following the blueprint of my ancestors. Our ancestors were resilient. They were strong. They rebuilt in the face of adversity. And that’s all I’m simply trying to do, is rebuild in the face of adversity. Tiffany: We have so much work to do. White people ask me all the time, ‘What can we do? What can I do? What can you tell me?’ And I just don’t think it’s my burden to teach white people how to not be racist. Go ask other white people. You get what I’m saying? How come I have to carry that burden too? It baffles me. But what I can do is share my perspective and my lived experience with you. And I will say that post George Floyd, we’re having hard conversations. People are waking up and attitudes are shifting. And we’re changing hearts and minds. And so I think that’s the silver lining right now.