A Story That Could Be True Anywhere

When I first moved to Tulsa, I obviously didn't know my way around it very well. I had a friend... well, an acquaintance, really... who had been here a while longer, and who offered to drive me around some so I could get my bearings. Tulsa is a pretty easy place to figure out, geographically speaking, once you get the system down.

There are some landmarks that he wanted to familiarize me with. We drove around mid-town for a while. At some point, he decided to "get the whole 'downtown' thing over with" so that I wouldn't get too lost if I ever had to head that direction.

Well, long story short, we got a little lost.

There's a dirty little secret about Tulsa. We are an unfortunately segregated city. Sure, it's not enforced by the law or anything, but it's enforced by the culture. Black people live on the north side, white people live on the south side. My initial impressions of Tulsa were pretty blown away. It seemed like such a "nice" place. Small town without being small, you know? But here's this ugly aspect of it... that the races are so divided, and we don't talk about it at all. The south side of Tulsa gets all the nice stuff: nicer parks, nicer pools, nicer roads. Not because it's all white people that live down there, but because black people are also disproportionately poor.

I couldn't get it off my mind for a while. My sense of "righteous indignancy" had been aroused. Why wasn't something being done? The government? The churches? The news media? Somebody should be talking about this. It's not fair! It's not right! Not in the buckle of the bible-belt.

My friend thought I was a little too caught up in it. That's just the way it was. Besides, there are a lot of nice things about Tulsa. They tend to balance out the bad stuff, he tried to reassure me.

Still, it ate at me. I told other people about how I felt, especially if they were considering moving here. For some reason, I always felt compelled to tell people "the other side of things". Maybe I'm just a trouble maker... something rotten in my jeans. I just felt it was the fair thing to do. You know, a "full disclosure" policy. "Sure, it's got it's healthy aspects, but you need to know the rest of the story." Usually, the people who were moving in to Tulsa appreciated the heads up.

Sometimes people got upset with me, though. Some had always lived in Tulsa, and they thought it was a nice place to live. They didn't like that I seemed to be attacking it. But I WASN'T attacking it. It's not like I thought that EVERYONE in Tulsa was a bad person. I just thought Tulsa would be a better place to live if we'd talk about this issue... if SOMEONE would at least acknowledge that it was there. But few seemed to want to talk about it. It was either old news, or it was inflamatory. Either way, no one was interested in fixing the problem.

So there is my little transparent story. I still live in Tulsa, but my wife and I are thinking that, someday, we might move back to Arkansas. Maybe. But that's a little ways down the road. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
posted by Stephen at 8:55 PM | |