Luke Harris and Joe Torres on America’s Racist Legacy

This week on CounterSpin: The crises we face right now in the US—a nominally democratic political process that’s strangled by white supremacist values, a corporate profiteering system that mindlessly overrides human needs to treat the environment as just another “input”—are terrible, but not, precisely, new. People have fought against these ideas in various forms before; and some strategies have been useful, others less so. The front line for us now is the fact that we have powerful actors who don’t just want to argue for particular ideas to guide us forward, but want to shut down the spaces in which we can have the arguments. And where a vigorous free press should be, we have corporate, commercial media that don’t have defending those spaces as their foremost concern. Luke Harris One crucial thing we now know we need to pro-actively fight for: our right to learn and teach real US history. Listeners will have heard of the campaign against “critical race theory”—a set of ideas of which right-wing opponents gleefully acknowledge they know and care nothing, but are using as cover to attack any race-conscious, that’s to say accurate and appropriate, teaching. CounterSpin put that cynical but impactful campaign in context last July with Luke Harris, co-founder and deputy director of the African American Policy Forum. Joe Torres Late last June, we talked about just the kind of story we all would know if our learning was inclusive and unafraid, the kind of story that would play a role in our understanding of the country’s growth—the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which 300 overwhelmingly Black people were killed, and some 800 shot or wounded. It’s a part of a sort of “hidden history” that the press corps have a role in hiding, as we discussed with Joe Torres, senior director of strategy and engagement at the group Free Press, and co-author, with Juan González, of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220805Harris.mp3 CounterSpin spoke with Luke Harris in July of 2021. Transcript: ‘We Can’t Fight for Racial Justice if We Can’t Learn About Racial Injustice’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220805Torres.mp3 We spoke with Joe Torres in June 2021. Transcript: Tulsa: ‘A Cover-Up Happens Because the Powers That Be Are Implicated’