Race, memory and implication in Tulsa’s Greenwood Rising

Abstract

This article analyses the new Greenwood Rising museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which tells the largely forgotten story of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Greenwood Rising is influenced by the broader global proliferation of memorial museums created to confront historical violence vis-à-vis today’s ‘politics of regret’ and works to centre slavery and racial inequality in American history as well as in contemporary society, representing a new intervention in the mnemonic struggles over slavery and its legacies in the United States. In its adherence to global memorial ethics, Greenwood Rising also places (White) visitors in the position of what Michael Rothberg has theorized as the ‘implicated subject’. However, Greenwood Rising has been highly controversial among Tulsa’s African American community, many of whom see the museum as a ‘symbolic gesture’ intended to obscure ongoing racism and replace material reparations. This controversy raises questions about the limits of memory in the face of ongoing injustice and highlights tensions between increasingly globalized ethics of remembrance and local mnemonic struggles.