|
Listen to this article here
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Of course, 2024 Tulsa mayoral candidate Karen Keith has raised more money than her opponent candidate Monroe Nichols and the other one, whose name I won’t mention because he’s a Ryan Walters supporter.
Keith is an older White woman in Tulsa who has more relationships and connections because she is an older White woman from Tulsa.
Many White Tulsans will subconsciously lean toward her because she is the alleged safer choice because she is White and has been around Tulsa’s political scene for some time. The perception that a Black candidate would bankrupt the city with reparations legislation or be soft on crime persists without evidence. It’s why Keith was endorsed by the FOP and why Tulsa’s White business community seemingly has.
It isn’t a negative opinion about her. It’s context!
We all know this city’s history of race relations and racial mistrust. We would be foolish to believe that Tulsa is a post-racial society. After all, we haven’t even elected our first Black mayor.
For me, I do not know Karen Keith, have never met her, nor had a conversation with her.
Keith has never reached out to me personally despite my owning the most-read Black-owned digital publication in the city and state and one of the fastest-growing in the nation.
I have never seen Keith at an event or even a Juneteenth festival in my community.
Notably, a Black Wall Street Times journalist has reached out to her three times. I have reached out to her personally via social media. We received no reply.
Perhaps she doesn’t think Black Media is important and, by extension, doesn’t think our Black lives, our voices, or our ally’s opinions are valuable.
If she doesn’t respond, I can’t form a sufficient analysis about her for Black Wall Street Times’ readers, who number in the hundreds of thousands, many of them in the Tulsa market.
What this looks like to me is that Karen Keith is only interviewing with White majority-owned and led media companies and purposely ignoring potential future Black constituents and those who care about our issues.
To me, it reveals a pattern of being racially disingenuous, and it’s alarming.
I could care less who the Tulsa Chamber endorses. The Tulsa Chamber doesn’t represent the community where I come from. The credibility of their opinion on who should be the next mayor of Tulsa was lost when it was revealed that the same chamber that endorsed Karen Keith played a role in trying to take Greenwood in the aftermath of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Moreover, they admitted that their actions played a role in shaping the racial dynamics and economic disparities in Tulsa. It took the Tulsa Chamber 98 years before they’d issue an apology.
Next, I could care less about who Tulsa World endorses. To me, their endorsement, much like the Tulsa Chamber, is a continuation of a majority-White power structural influence on Tulsa residents that completely disregards the opinions of the city’s Black, Latino, and other communities stake in this mayoral race.
Present-day headlines pushing Karen Keith – from a century-old publication that played a role in shaping the city’s racial dynamics that includes a merger from the Tulsa Tribune, which ignited the 1921 Tulsa Race massacre with its yellow journalism – isn’t equity; it’s White supremacy.
We must unlearn how we think about white supremacy because it isn’t just about Nazis and Klansmen. White supremacy has a spectrum.
On one end, you have violent white supremacists, those who are willing to terrorize and even kill those who aren’t White. That other end of the White supremacy spectrum is more complex. It’s shaped by policies and social norms that adversely affect people who are non-White.
For example, a year before the centennial of the commemoration of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, the Tulsa World published an article saying that their editorial board had voted to continue calling the massacre a riot despite 300 Black bodies being lynched and carelessly dumped into mass graves around the city.
In an attempt to be diplomatic, I reached out to one of the board members to find out how they reached this decision. I had questions about the racial demographical makeup of the board. This member then revealed that there were no Black people on the editorial board at the time of that decision. I told this member that they should get a Black person on their editorial board and have another discussion. They did, and the Tulsa World has referred to the horrific event as a massacre since.
Lastly, I could care less about Tulsa Mayor GT Bynum’s potential endorsement of Karen Keith because he can’t publicly come to terms with his own Bynum-ancestors’ role in enslaving Black bodies. This isn’t a dig at the mayor of Tulsa. Again, it’s context, pointing out potential racial biases in endorsements.
I say all this because Tulsa’s institutions and key city influencers who are White should recognize that their voices are only empowered by decades of racial injustice. Not because they are legitimate but because they have been given the perception of legitimacy and influential power based on their ascribed status of merely being White in a city that was set up against Black prosperity and, by extension, our collective prosperity regardless of race.
My message to Tulsa’s majority-White-led institutions and key influencers is instead of repeating white-centric, influential endorsements just because you can perhaps adopt a polycentric process that is more reflective of the city’s present-day racial makeup.
The Tulsa Mayoral Election is on Tuesday, August 27, 2024. Ensure you know the location of your polling station by clicking here.
I myself aswell as my mother has crossed paths with karen kieth and she constantly dodging interaction over anything.
She tries to leave neighborhood meetings in communities over serious issues, like the lack of support and development in north and west tulsa, no grocery stores, no places for teens to go to and more…
And when the levy broke in my neighborhood she was more concerned with sand springs then Tulsa , because she gave them almost an hour notice but only gave my neighborhood less than 5 minutes before the water swallowed up my neighborhood.
She truly only cares about herself and hates being called out
One can only wonder what mpg her broom gets.
I am reading a lil’ more to become familiar with Tulsa politics. I read. Informative.
Article ended with suggestion mayor become more “polycentric” in process.
The black population is historically entrenched. With slavery and massacre horrors.
The Indians are entrenched. Minus the terrible history of slavery and the like. So why are they more economically and culturally supported?