Detecting Blackness, Blackwashing History

HBO’s Watchmen, was not just an interesting show that discussed race in passing, but a great one that had the boldness to honestly tackle the reality of blackness in America.

This is easily seen by two things the show does in a bold fashion: 1) It tackles a subject that I have seen few other pop culture products tackle; and 2) it blackwashes American history.

Let’s start with the first thing mentioned.

I saw something on HBO I thought I’d never see on television: the depiction of a dark day in American history that not many know about — the Tulsa massacre.

Late in the afternoon of May 30, 1921, Dick Rowland needed to use the bathroom. A nineteen-year-old black shoe-shiner working in segregated Oklahoma, he could only use the restroom for coloreds at the top of the Drexel building in downtown Tulsa. To get there, he had to take an elevator operated by Sarah Page, a seventeen-year-old white teenager.

While there are conflicting reports about what happened in the elevator, what we do know is that on May 30, 1921, a clothing store clerk on the building’s first floor heard what he thought was a woman screaming. Not long after, the building’s elevator doors opened and Rowland quickly exited, looking flustered. Page, behind him, appeared to be in a state of distress. Assuming that Page had been sexually assaulted by Rowland, the clerk called the police, thus setting in motion a chain of events that would devastate the black citizens of Tulsa. Over the next fourteen hours, thirty-five city blocks in Tulsa’s black neighborhoods were burned, an estimated 800 people were injured, and hundreds were killed.

I’m a black man from Oklahoma, and the reason I know that history is because my family members have told it to me since I was a child. A cousin was murdered during those evil hours, and to keep his memory alive, they tell the story of what happened in Tulsa because they were never able to find his body. Telling stories about my cousin Bobby is the only way my family was able to honor him because they were kept from burying him properly. Now, as a college professor at Oklahoma State University, I teach that history in my Philosophy of Race classes, and I am always surprised to learn how few students — even those from Tulsa — are aware of what happened one hundred years ago in this state we call home. So, I was shocked to see it depicted for the world to see at the beginning of Watchmen in 2018.

Like my students, not many Americans were aware of the incident of mass domestic terrorism that the show depicted. Inspired by the questions she was getting, Regina King took to Twitter to inform those with questions that this was, indeed, something that happened.

Seeing so many engaged by what happened in Tulsa in 1921 was a strange feeling. I want the truth to come out. I wanted us asking hard questions about our shameful racial past, and I think it is important for us to come to terms with how vicious institutional and interpersonal racism is and was. Many Black people in Tulsa lost almost everything, and then they were told to be silent about the pain they had endured. So the work of uncovering this history is important and necessary — but I had questions about how it was being done.

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen was a graphic novel that came out in 1987, and what showrunner Damon Lindelof was up to with the HBO continuation of this story was quite promising. He took many elemnts from the comic and turned it into a pretty straightforward mystery to be solved by our hero, Detective Angela Abar (also known as Sister Knight.) This allowed the show to follow the familiar tropes of solving a mystery with Abar as our guide, but also made room for the show to go deeper with its examination of race.

Yet, to start with the Tulsa massacre...