Tom Hanks on the Tulsa Massacre: Knowing and acknowledging history makes people wiser

The Paper's reporter Cheng Xiaojun

A hundred years ago in the United States, a group of white supremacist thugs launched an attack on the black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, frantically throwing incendiary bombs, almost reducing them to rubble. Three hundred black people were killed and nearly 10,000 were left homeless. This long history of white racial atrocities against blacks has been obscured and downplayed in the United States to the extent that most Americans lack understanding of it.

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Genocide, US President Joe Biden finally issued a proclamation calling on the American people to reflect deeply on this history and work towards eradicating systemic racism throughout the United States. A few days ago, Tom Hanks, a famous actor who has starred in films such as "Forrest Gump", "Happy Terminal", and "Desert Island Rest", published a long article in the New York Times, calling on the American people to face history squarely and not forget history.

Tom hanks

In an article titled "You Should Know the History of the Tulsa Massacre," Hanks pointedly pointed out that in the United States, "white teachers and white school administrators deliberately omit this explosive topic in order to maintain the status quo of society, and disregard the lives of black people in order to take into account the feelings of white people."

Although Tom Hanks is a well-known celebrity in the United States, he has long avoided excessive involvement in various political and socially sensitive topics, consciously or unconsciously. More time, off-screen, he is fond of fans for collecting anecdotes such as typewriters. Even though he has actively cheered for Democrats such as Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Biden, he has often participated in various charitable activities to support American veterans on the other side, which is also popular in the Republican Party. Therefore, this time he wrote a special article specifically for the centenary of the Tulsa Massacre, which was somewhat unexpected.

In the text, Tom Hanks claims to be a layman who is keen to talk about history after tea and dinner, from elementary school to high school to college, full of four years of history classes, usually interested in historical stories, love to watch historical documentaries. "But the vast majority of those talk about white history, so I never saw a single page of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre in a history textbook in my entire student days." I am not alone in this situation, but it is quite common. The vast majority of history is written by white people, and it's all about white people like me, and black histories like the Tulsa Massacre are often overlooked. ”

Hanks, 65, admits that he didn't learn about this unforgettable American past for the first time from a New York Times article until July 2020. "Think about the history classes I've taken myself, I've studied the Boston Tea Party, I've studied the Declaration of Independence, I've studied the Whiskey Riots (note: the tax resistance movement in Pennsylvania, USA in 1791), I've learned about the Wright brothers who invented airplanes. Our textbooks talk about the great floods in American history, about the Great San Francisco earthquake, but when it comes to Tulsa, all I know is the name of a city on the prairie, and no teacher has ever told us about the massacre of blacks there in 1921. By the same token, no teacher spoke of the massacre of blacks in Slocum, Texas, in 1910, or the 1919 attacks on blacks by white supremacists known as Red Summer in more than two dozen cities across the Country. Thousands of American students like me have been told that the lynchings that happened to black people were a tragedy. But no one tells us that such public murders were once common across the country and were praised by various local media and law enforcement agencies. ”

It is clear that Hanks focused his reflections on education in the United States. "The truth of the Tulsa Massacre, the long history of violence by some white Americans against black Americans, has all been systematically ignored. The reason behind this may be because some people think that if such a thing is placed in a history textbook, it will be too frank, too painful, and it will make us white children feel unbearable. As a result, our schools chose not to teach these, our literary creations chose not to mention these, and my own film and television industry has not paid attention to these contents for a long time. ”

"Looking back now, I can't help but wonder, if we had been told about the Tulsa Massacre since elementary school, would our generation's perception have been very different from what it is now?" Looking back now, I really think it's sad that such an omission. Such a good opportunity was missed, which could have played a good educational role, but it was wasted. As a result, to this day, some white Americans are outraged when they hear about systemic racial discrimination. Because they insisted that since the founding of the United States, everyone has been equal, regardless of the color of the united states, anyone can be the president of the United States. Do they dare to say that to the survivors of the Tulsa Massacre and the descendants of the survivors? Hanks wrote.

Recently, the debate over the inclusion of more racially-related curricula in the S.-based primary and secondary school syllabus has been raging across the country. Proponents argue that it is too late to make amends, while opponents feel that it will put unnecessary pressure on white children whose minds are still in their developmental stages — after all, the sin is not in them, but in their ancestors.

In response to this controversy, Hanks also expressed his own views very firmly, "Should the school tell the truth about the Tulsa Massacre now?" I think so. And the fear of offending white students cannot be sustained in the past white-based syllabus. Hanks points out that, like historical events such as the Pentagon case, the Tulsa Massacre is part of America's tangled past history. "Only by understanding history and acknowledging history can people be wiser and make us stronger in our hearts."

Editor-in-Charge: Zhang Zhe

Proofreader: Ding Xiao