Downplaying the Tulsa Race Massacre and telling Tulsans to “move on” from seeking justice isn’t what you might expect a Black candidate running for city council to express. For candidate Eddie Huff, however, it’s just the latest example of a person willing to denigrate his own people to appease white, conservative voters.

On Tuesday, Public Radio Tulsa’s Max Bryan interviewed Huff, a far-right Republican, about his views on one of the nation’s worst acts of racial domestic terror.

“They’ve used the word ‘massacre’ to try to make it sound worse,” Huff said.

I’m not sure who the ‘they” is that Huff refers to, aside from the historians, anthropologists and even government entities that all agree it was a massacre. I’m also not sure what “sounds worse” than the systematic burning, bombing and bullet-riddling of Greenwood residents and the block-by-block destruction of the community’s infrastructure. Perhaps, Huff can enlighten me.

Eddie Huff’s history of bigotry

The Tulsa City Council District 7 election on November 5 is the definition of irony. Huff, a Black man who downplays genocide against Black people, faces Lori Decter Wright, a white woman who supports reparations for Greenwood.

Eddie Huff reminds me of a character from “The Boondocks,”a popular early 2000s satirical, adult cartoon. It followed a pair of Black boys who moved from a low-income neighborhood to their grandpa’s home in a wealthy, gated and mostly white community after the death of their parents.

The kids come across various characters who represent exaggerations of common archetypes found in Black communities. One of those archetypes is “Uncle Ruckus,” a Black man who expresses hate toward his own Blackness and other Black people in a desperate attempt to be accepted by white conservatives.

Huff, a former co-host of a conservative radio show and a licensed minister, is no stranger to controversy. He drew condemnation when social media posts from 2015 were uncovered last month.

In the posts, Huff downplayed John McCain’s experience as a war prisoner. He defended the Confederate flag after a white supremacist mass shooter massacred Black Christians praying inside a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Ultimately, he compared the removal of the flag from the State Capitol to “black folks attacking white peoples property.”

Voters have a clear choice

In August, Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum, who stubbornly opposes Tulsa massacre survivors’ requests for cash payments, approved the city’s first-ever reparations commission. It comes from recommendations in the “Beyond Apology” report.

“You can’t just take people’s money and be benevolent and give it to an entity that you had nothing to do with, and you don’t know if they had anything to do with it,” Eddie Huff told Public Radio Tulsa.

Archives from the Tulsa Historical Society show the city government deputized a white mob of thousands of white men who destroyed the Greenwood community, setting fire to over 200 businesses along Black Wall Street and killing upwards of 300 Black men, women and children.

Meanwhile, incumbent Lori Decter Wright has supported justice for the survivors and descendants through her words and her votes.

Voters in District 7 have an important decision to make: Do you want a city councilor who you may not always agree with but who stands up for all communities? Or do you want a representative who sells out members of his own community? Choose wisely.

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Deon Osborne was born in Minneapolis, MN and raised in Lawton, OK before moving to Norman where he attended the University of Oklahoma. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Strategic Media and has...