Tulsa Massacre: The Loser Class vs. Black Entrepreneurs

Tulsa in flames during race riot, 1921.
Here is my latest audio and video commentary for Salem.
President Trump is officially launching his re-election campaign on June 20th in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Before Tulsa’s black residents were massacred by a racist mob in 1921, Tulsa was home to what was known as “Black Wall Street”—a hub for an emerging class of affluent black entrepreneurs.
In the decades after the Civil War, former slave Booker T. Washington spear-headed the creation of a black entrepreneurial class through his Tuskegee Institute—rooted in the Biblical foundations of human dignity and the merit of hard-work: Washington wrote that the black slave came out of bondage “with a hammer and a saw in his hands and a Bible in his hands.”
The president has an opportunity to shift the conversation towards the heroic successes of black people—despite the troubling history.
He can shift the focus from victimhood to victory. I hope he uses it.
The audio of this commentary is here. And you can find the video here.
The victims of the Tulsa Massacre deserve to have their whole story told. They built “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa and that stoked envy. If we ignore the economic dimension of racial strife, we miss quite a bit. Stagnation is segregation’s friend. If you’re some illiterate, lazy loser living in the South, you had at least one group you could look down on: black people. But what happens when we get economic dynamism in a country and an energy boom in Oklahoma? Classes start moving around. Merit means more. Competent black workers and entrepreneurs move up (note the frequent use by racists of the epithet ‘uppity’), and then you get wealthy black people. And the loser class can’t stand that (just like it can’t stand Jews — see George Gilder’s excellent book, The Israel Test).
The massacre of 1921 was the Tulsa Test and it failed. Envy won.
We have this national (non-nutritious) food fight about Confederate Monuments. Maybe try to understand why so many of these monuments were built in the 1920s, why the wave was at that time. Why did southern segregationists oppose the JFK tax cuts? See Larry Kudlow and Brian Domitrovic’s great book about that for the details.
Because the white hood brigades understand that growth tends to break down boundaries of race and sex in the marketplace. That’s why slavery nostalgists like Thomas Carlyle called economics ‘the Dismal Science’ because they knew it would destroy the class system, which they treasured, with a class of noblemen poets (poetry being ‘the Gay Science’) which they thought was only possible built on a foundation of a slave class.
Want to really punch a fascist in the face? Build an innovative business and hire and promote based on merit. Get America above a 4% growth rate, and keep it there for a long time. Tear down a 1920s statue… Or don’t tear one down. Meh, I hardly care. I care so much more about what you build than what you tear down. You can be taken up with making history or you can be taken up with fighting about it.
Originally published on Townhall Finance.
Jerry Bowyer is a Forbes contributor, contributing editor of AffluentInvestor.com, and Senior Fellow in Business Economics at The Center for Cultural Leadership.
Jerry has compiled an impressive record as a leading thinker in finance and economics. He worked as an auditor and a tax consultant with Arthur Anderson, as Vice President of the Beechwood Company which is the family office associated with Federated Investors, and has consulted in various privatization efforts for Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. He founded the influential economic think tank, the Allegheny Institute, and has lectured extensively at universities, businesses and civic groups.
Jerry has been a member of three investment committees, among which is Benchmark Financial, Pittsburgh’s largest financial services firm. Jerry had been a regular commentator on Fox Business News and Fox News. He was formerly a CNBC Contributor, has guest-hosted “The Kudlow Report”, and has written for CNBC.com, National Review Online, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as many other publications. He is the author of The Bush Boom and more recently The Free Market Capitalist’s Survival Guide, published by HarperCollins. Jerry is the President of Bowyer Research.
Jerry consulted extensively with the Bush White House on matters pertaining to the recent economic crisis. He has been quoted in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine, The International Herald Tribune and various local newspapers. He has been a contributing editor of National Review Online, The New York Sun and Townhall Magazine. Jerry has hosted daily radio and TV programs and was one of the founding members of WQED’s On-Q Friday Roundtable. He has guest-hosted the Bill Bennett radio program as well as radio programs in Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles.
Jerry is the former host of WorldView, a nationally syndicated Sunday-morning political talk show created on the model of Meet The Press. On WorldView, Jerry interviewed distinguished guests including the Vice President, Treasury Secretary, HUD Secretary, former Secretary of Sate Condoleezza Rice, former Presidential Advisor Carl Rove, former Attorney General Edwin Meese and publisher Steve Forbes.
Jerry has taught social ethics at Ottawa Theological Hall, public policy at Saint Vincent’s College, and guest lectured at Carnegie Mellon’s graduate Heinz School of Public Policy. In 1997 Jerry gave the commencement address at his alma mater, Robert Morris University. He was the youngest speaker in the history of the school, and the school received more requests for transcripts of Jerry’s speech than at any other time in its 120-year history.
Jerry lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, Susan, and the youngest three of their seven children.
Trending Now on Affluent Christian Investor
Sorry. No data so far.
The Affluent Mix
Biden Oblivious To Illegal Immigration Issues... August 2, 2021 | Frank Vernuccio

Rob Arnott On Bubbles, Inflation, And Once-In-A-Generation Investment Opportunit... August 2, 2021 | Jerry Bowyer

The Federal Reserve’s Massive Theft Of Stability... August 2, 2021 | Jim Huntzinger

What To Do About This Difficult Market? August 2, 2021 | David Bahnsen

Letter On The Politicization Of Corporations... July 26, 2021 | Jerry Bowyer

Peak Of The Fake Bull Market July 26, 2021 | Michael Pento

Woodrow Wilson’s Administrative State vs. Gold... July 26, 2021 | Jim Huntzinger

Dividends, Energy, And Crypto July 26, 2021 | David Bahnsen

Whose Side Are You On? July 26, 2021 | Frank Vernuccio

Media, Left Ignore These Dangers July 19, 2021 | Frank Vernuccio

Mark Skousen On FreedomFest And How To Measure The Whole Economy... July 19, 2021 | Jerry Bowyer

Quantifying The Quantitative, Or Making Easy The Easing... July 19, 2021 | David Bahnsen

The Gold Standard Means A Rising Standard Of Living... July 19, 2021 | Jim Huntzinger

Book Review: Brian Domitrovic Reveals The Monetary Genius Of Arthur Laffer... July 19, 2021 | John Tamny

Steve Forbes: Time To Worry About Inflation, Not Hyperinflation... July 12, 2021 | Jerry Bowyer

UFOs Rescue Biden July 12, 2021 | Frank Vernuccio

Read This Classical Economist’s 200 Year Old Warning About Paper Money... July 12, 2021 | Jim Huntzinger

How Central Banks Murdered The Markets July 12, 2021 | Michael Pento

Everything There Is To Know About The Stock Market... July 12, 2021 | David Bahnsen

AT&T CEO: We’re Ill Equipped For Politics, And We’re Spending A Lot Of ... July 6, 2021 | Jerry Bowyer

Internet Bias Distorts National Conversation... July 6, 2021 | Frank Vernuccio

The Halfway Point Of 2021 July 6, 2021 | David Bahnsen

Join the conversation!
We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, vulgarity, profanity, all caps, or discourteous behavior. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain a courteous and useful public environment where we can engage in reasonable discourse.