Ninety-nine years ago this year, an entire black community was massacred in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Violence stretched over two days in the city’s Greenwood section. Thirty-six people were killed — more than two-thirds of them black. White supremacists obliterated families and their entire way of life.
But in the 23 years I grew up in Oklahoma, I wasn’t taught a word about the Tulsa Massacre. It was never mentioned because the black experience was to be ignored. It wasn’t to be seen.
I couldn’t understand the massacre because I had no exposure to it. I couldn’t see its scars because they were purposely hidden from me. And I couldn’t internalize its lessons because I had no proximity.
Such ignorance of our own history — our own problems and stories as a people — simmers under the racial cauldron that’s boiling into the streets nationwide. We can’t hope for a permanent peace without delving into one another’s reality, including the painful truths in our shared past.
So how can we get up close in a global pandemic, when we’re supposed to stay socially distant?
We can turn to the outlets and digital devices that have been keeping us connected and use them for a higher purpose: We can use them for art.
We can use them to call up a film we wouldn’t have watched before — a production that takes us somewhere we haven’t considered, direct from our living rooms.
We can listen to music whose stories haven’t graced our minds. We can download or check out literature that illuminates lives, problems and ideas we haven’t fathomed. We can discover podcasts, radio stations, live performances and community conversations outside our comfort zones, outside our norms.
In short, we can turn to those who create — journalists, importantly, among them — to foster new proximity to problems, to history, to the everyday circumstances we might not think about.
Justice advocate Bryan Stevenson has it right: Proximity is a gateway to the vulnerable and ignored, a channel to understanding and negotiating our differences as we build healthier, more bonded communities.
The pandemic has made it tougher in the short term to develop literal, in-person proximity — one casualty amid the unimaginable loss wrought by the novel coronavirus. We’ve lost lives, expectations, jobs, economic stability, even a way of life.
But we were losing proximity long before the virus arrived. Our distance and disconnection have been building in tandem with inequity, digital isolation and the fragmentation of media.
Cleaved apart further by socioeconomic chasms, divisive politics and social media, many of us are insulated against the racism, violence and systemic injustices that should be unavoidable. It’s an environment that lets us too easily lose sight of the humanity in each of us.
It’s an environment where it’s too easy for a police officer like Derek Chauvin to have no meaningful relationship with a man like George Floyd. If you see a man like George as a human being, as your brother, and not just a dude on the ground, it should be impossible to press your knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes.We must remember George Floyd not just as a name, but as a man. We must remember his mother, his kids, his aunts and uncles. We must hold up his fundamental humanity. We must hold up his story.
It’s important, too, that we remember Derek Chauvin — what he was taught, how he was trained, what led to his views, what life experiences he never had — all the things that led to his lack of proximity to the story of George Floyd.
To bridge these divides, we’ll need artists — playwrights, filmmakers, musicians, photographers, journalists, choreographers — all artists — not just today, but for the duration, to show us how we got here, to reveal ourselves, to bind us tighter. We need that proximity in every medium and every fashion we can muster.
It’s the only way out.
Ravi S. Rajan is the president of the California Institute of the Arts.
