“Goin’ Back to T-Town” is an hour-long PBS documentary that was first broadcast on in 1993, then rebroadcast in February of this year — 2021, one hundred years after the white riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that laid waste to the vital Black business section of the city — as an episode of the 33rd season of the PBS American Experience series.
During May 31 and June 1 of 1921, white mobs attacked Black residents and demolished almost all of the homes and businesses in the Greenwood District of Tulsa. Greenwood, also known as “Black Wall Street,” was the wealthiest Black community in the United States at that time. “Goin’ Back to T-Town” documents how the residents of Greenwood rebuilt their community in all its vitality after the riot, never ceasing to identify themselves with Greenwood and with one another. But the video also documents how Greenwood eventually succumbed to a radical erosion of that community, an erosion occasioned by integration itself, most especially as it was accompanied by corporate capitalist development of the whole of Tulsa, pointedly including Greenwood, beginning in the Eisenhauer era.
It was especially the construction of an Interstate highway right through the heart of the once vital, vibrant Black community that finally tore Greenwood apart. That scar through the center of Greenwood divided the district, separating erstwhile neighbors from one another and sending each alone into the wasteland of expanding U.S. consumer capitalist society. There, each one of us — including the relatively few token Blacks, women, and members of other disadvantaged segments of the general population who are allowed to rise up the social ladder, in order to create the illusion of equal opportunity for all — is left to sink or swim all by oneself.
Paradoxically, then, the eventual dissolution, through integration itself, of the once vibrant and vital community of Greenwood demonstrated that it was precisely the preceding segregation — the exclusion of Blacks from full participation in the society of Tulsa — that had earlier forced the same Blacks to come together in and asa genuine community on their own. In contrast, once integration began the heirs of the Greenwood community legacy began to drift away, not only from that particular section of Tulsa, but also, and far more significantly, from all real connection with one another. They ceased any longer to form a genuine community at all, and just joined the general mass of isolated individuals that makes up modern consumer society.
Near the end of “Goin’ Back to T-Town,” the narrator neatly articulates that truth by saying, “Ironically, Greenwood, which had been built in the face of racial hatred, which had survived total destruction, would not survive integration.”
The remains of Greenwood after the white race riot of 1921
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Nor were the Blacks of Tulsa—or Blacks in general—the only people who were brought together by their very exclusion from the dominant society. They were not the only people who underwent the “Inclusive Exclusion” I refer to in my title for today’s post, in contrast to “Exclusive Inclusion” I refer to in the title of my last post before this one. I will mention just two examples.
Jews, even for a much longer period than Black Africans, also experienced such inclusive exclusion. For a shorter, but still prolonged period than Blacks, the indigenous peoples of the Americas did, too. In this post I will confine myself to citing just two passages concerning those two cases.
The first is from Nuestra América: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation (New York: Other Press, 2021), a recent book by Claudio Lomnitz. Published earlier this year, in the same month PBS rebroadcast “Goin’ Back to T-Town,” Lomnitz’s book tells the story of how his ancestors, driven to flee central Europe to escape murderous antisemitism, moved to the western hemishpere, where they found and helped to build an international community among other displaced Jews from various places of origin and living in various places across South America. The following paragraph comes from a portion of the book in which Lomnitz explicitly addresses the intersection between such uprooted Jews, who send down new roots into such new, broader, no longer geographically confined community, on the one hand, and the similar situation of indigenous peoples after the European conquest of the Americas, on the other.
Beyond the question of a shared penchant for irony, the fact of their anteriority and independence prior to having been brutally (but always only partially) subjugated made it so that Amerindians and their Jewish counterparts could each draw on a cultural repertoire that reached back before Christianity, from which they could imagine a different world. For them revolution meant recovering a voice that had been lost to the “civilized” world. It was for this reason that the rescue of Hebrew, the rescue of the sacred places of Jewish antiquity, the aesthetic discovery of the indigenous world, the exultation of its languages, and the recovery of its ruins were taken in like fresh air from a new world. It was the breath of a revolution.
The second passage I will cite is even more recent. It comes from a newspaper article by Richard Read with the content-descriptive headline, “Despite obstacles, Native Americans have the nation’s highest COVID-19 vaccination rate.” The article was published in the Los Angeles Times on August 12, 2021. In the passage below Read speaks to how Native American tribal communities came eventually to respond with one harmonious collective voice to the current pandemic, in sharp contrast to the response of the dominant society in the United States, which has been cacophonous.
In a survey last fall — before clinical trial results came out showing vaccines to be safe and effective — only 35% of Indian Health Service field workers said they would "definitely" or "probably" get shots.
But tribal leaders understood that vaccines were the clearest way out of the pandemic. They took to the radio and social media to promote them, warning that elders faced the greatest danger in communities vulnerable due to high rates of diabetes, heart disease and obesity.
The result is captured in the article’s headline.
Claudio Lomnitz
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By whatever means and by whomever people get uprooted and excluded, that very exclusion can and often actually does deepen the roots of their genuine inclusion in their own native communities. The story of Greenwood and the passages from both Lomnitz and Read attest to that, as do many other stories and passages throughout history.
In the final analysis, it is always the excluders who are most truly excluded. By excluding others, they lock themselves out of all human community.