Speak up and educate

 Russell Westbrook did what he could, on the night of Memorial Day. Went for another consciousness-altering triple double, this time a 19-point, 21-rebound, 14-assist stat line that  would leave veteran Russ watchers slack-jawed if they hadn't seen him do it so often before.

Oh, yeah: This one also helped the Washington Wizards avoid a sweep against the 76ers with a 122-114 win.

And 24 hours or so before that?

Well. He was altering consciousness in another way.

As an executive producer, he had a hand in a May 30 documentary that aired on the History Channel, which took a night off from ice-road truckers, crab fishermen and weird guys who live alone in the mountains to commit some actual history for a change. 

The documentary was titled "Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre," of which Westbrook had never heard before he landed down the road in Oklahoma City as a star with the Thunder. A man with a questing and insatiably curious mind, Westbrook was fascinated and horrified by this awful piece of American history -- one so awful that those who by and large write our history chose to bury it in an unmarked grave.

Monday was its 100th anniversary. And thanks in part to Westbrook and LeBron James and a lot of other fully formed humans a certain segment of America sees as nothing but vaudeville entertainers, what happened in the Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood on May 31, 1921, is finally getting its proper light.

What happened on that day is a mob of whites -- vigilantes, terrorists, either term works -- stormed Greenwood, the black section of Tulsa that was so prosperous people who'd seen it and moved through it dubbed it "Black Wall Street." The whites, using as an excuse outrage over a fictitious assault on a white woman by a black man, burned it to the ground, slaughtering anywhere from 100 to 300 of its residents and compelling thousands more to flee for their lives.

So intent on destroying what blacks in Tulsa had built, they even bombed it from the air.

It was not the first murderous eradication of a black community in America, nor would it be the last. Those who know can find not just Tulsa on a sociological map, but also other places: Colfax, La., and Rosewood, Fla., and East St. Louis, Ill., and a dozen or so others.

Lost to memory, most of them. Never mentioned in the sanitized American history texts most of us grew up reading in school. Lied about, denied, not to be spoken of.

Except ...

Except now some folks are insisting on speaking of it. And some of them are basketball players, dammit, who are paid outrageous sums of money to shut up and play, not to speak up and educate.

Why, how dare they!

Look. Here's what I know, as someone with a modest grasp of history myself: If all you teach or learn about history is what makes you feel inspired or uplifted, you're not teaching or learning history. You're teaching or learning propaganda.

History is messy, being the product of human beings with all their virtues and flaws. It is not always pretty and wave-the-flag and glory-be. And most times, it is the un-pretty, un-glorious part that is of most value to those who study it.

For instance: You can't properly understand the way race colors so much in America by pretending it doesn't. And you can't pretend it doesn't by pretending 400 years of slavery, Jim Crow and state-sponsored segregation in America were just some blip on the radar. And you can't understand that if you don't understand how the Founding Fathers, great men that they were, set all of it in  motion by kicking the slavery can down the road.

It was simple expedience: In order to form a more perfect union, they'd have to arrive at some imperfect solutions. They'd have to let some things slide. So they did.

That certain segment of America doesn't want to hear that. They don't want their kids to hear it, making Critical Race Theory their current boogeyman without really knowing what it is and isn't. They shout "Cancel culture!", another of their boogeymen, while busily going about trying to Cancel Culture themselves.

They have it all backwards, as usual. Cancel culture is what our sanitized American history gave us. What's dubbed "cancel culture" now is merely a long overdue correction of the record.

And so, yes, let's talk about what happened in Tulsa on May 31, 1921. Let's talk about the thread that runs from that day to this, because history is all about the threads that run from that day to this. 

"The Tulsa Race Massacre was not something I was taught about in school or in any of my history books," Westbrook said in a statement in February when the documentary plans were unveiled. "This is one of many overlooked stories of African Americans in this country that deserves to be told. These are the stories we must honor and amplify so we can learn from the past and create a better future."

Indeed.