The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre brands the city in a unique way from others with the same inequities. Its violence and destruction has become the nation’s symbol for historical injustices.

The tragedy was followed by decades of racist laws and practices and biased attitudes trickling through time.

To get a handle on the overall disparities, the city of Tulsa in 2017 launched the Equality Indicators Report to determine data in six areas. It was updated in 2020 and will have its next report by the fall.

City officials deserve credit and encouragement to continue the project that doesn’t always paint Tulsa in a positive light.

“Without knowing, we can’t do anything about it,” said Krystal Reyes, the city’s chief resilience officer. “There is more of an understanding of why an equity lens is important to look at data and then to come up with solutions. The more and more we talk about it, the more and more we normalize it and the more we can bring people on board to work with us.”

The Tulsa Race Massacre literally erased the city’s Black wealth of that time.

Real estate and property damage in today’s dollars range from $20 million to $200 million. No government reparations were made. Insurance claims were denied. Civil lawsuits, with a two-year statute of limitations, went nowhere.

The devastation continued in the following decades with laws and practices that limited access for non-white residents to education, homeownership, entrepreneurship and business leadership.

For the disenfranchised, gaining a foothold was more difficult to achieve and maintain. That has a generational affect.

The aftermath is seen in the underrepresentation of people of color in business C-suite offices, homeownership and income. Minority neighborhoods have a proliferation of payday lenders and few banks.

White Tulsans are 17 times more likely to be business executives and nearly twice as likely to own a home compared to Black Tulsans. The median income for white Tulsans is nearly double that of Black Tulsans.

The Hamilton Project last year found that the net worth of a typical white American family is nearly 10 times greater than that of a Black family and found no simple explanation.

The disparity cannot be explained solely by educational attainment, debt or income. It’s more complex, involving tax structures that favor more white households and underfunding government programs that benefit Black households.

Achieving financial parity is at the heart of Tuesday’s Economic Empowerment Summit at the Cox Business Center, said Eric Stevenson, president of Nationwide Retirement Solutions and a member of the University of Oklahoma Board of Regents.

“It has to start with financial literacy and with how do you build wealth and view debt and credit,” Stevenson said. “Homeownership is a place of stability and support for people to do well in high school and continue education whether that’s in four-year university or another place that propels you to the next level.

“That’s huge, and we have to continue to break down all the barriers that keep us from doing that.”

Another path to equity is for corporate executives to make sure economic portfolios, such as 401(k) employee investments, have diverse management. In the U.S., only 1.4% of assets are managed by minority- and women-owned firms, Stevenson said.

“If Black-owned and women-owned firms managed just 10% of the money out there, the wealth redistribution that would create would blow you away,” Stevenson said. “The country wouldn’t look anything like it looks today. It would be transformational.”

So often, executives say they don’t know any minority-owned asset firms or have concerns about their outcomes, even though data indicate higher returns among those firms, he said.

That’s the same type of excuse used to explain why more people of color are not appointed to boards, commissions and other leadership positions.

“The performance gap and availability are both myths we will be addressing,” Stevenson said. “If we can help those firms be even more successful, that will create additional reinvestment back into the Black community.”

Without parity in wealth, a host of other inequities emerge. Nothing exists in a vacuum.

It leads to Tulsa evictions in non-white majority neighborhoods being almost twice the rate of majority white neighborhoods. Or Black Tulsa households being three times more likely to lack access to a vehicle than white households.

Black Tulsans are arrested at 2.5 times the rate of white residents. For Black youth, it’s more than triple the rate.

These gaps hold true for other groups.

Hispanic Tulsans are less likely than white Tulsans to have high-speed internet, and indigenous youth in Tulsa are twice as likely to experience homelessness.

The city of Tulsa has been holding public sessions on equality data since January, with those available for viewing online at tulsaei.org.

“All of these things are interlinked,” Reyes said. “Whenever possible, we really move the conversation to the root causes of these disparities, moving beyond individual-level factors and more into policy-level factors, historical factors and systemic issues.

“Those root causes stem from where there are policies in place around neighborhoods or from investments in other areas that impact health or education.”

The Tulsa Race Massacre story is being told in documentaries, pop culture, art and in a permanent exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It now has a prominent spot in the Tulsa Public Schools curriculum.

We have a role to play in the nation’s ongoing reckoning on race, and it should be embraced.

Tulsa has made progress recently: an ongoing search for possible massacre mass graves, approval of a Tax Increment District for a north Tulsa business industrial park, creation of a rapid transit bus line, opening of a grocery store to end a food desert, construction on the Greenwood Rising History Center and efforts in the arts and capital improvements in the Greenwood District.

These are good, and long overdue, starts.

“This work has to live beyond this administration if we want to move Tulsa forward,” Reyes said. “We want everyone to feel that this is accessible to understand the data and to reach out to our office to work on various actions to implement to make a change.”

In 100 years, what will Tulsa look like? What will future residents think, write and say about what we are doing now to make life better for everyone?

The cameras, celebrities and U.S. president will leave Tulsa. As they do, Tulsans must not lose focus.

These disparities will remain. The divisions won’t go away. The work to be better must go on.

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