Imagine if the Black community had control of energy. That’s where the power lies. You get to dictate the cost of goods. You get to dictate what gets shipped where. You get to dictate how much it costs to go to work.
Energy dominance is the key to maintaining systems of oppression.
When you control energy you can keep people in poverty. If the government tries to raise minimum wage, all you have to do to retaliate is raise the price of energy. The result is a price increase for products and services across the board which effectively eliminates the gains of the wage hike.
It’s no secret that only a few companies control the world’s energy supply. It’s also not a secret that the oil industry has a shameful history of supporting and promoting racist ideologies. We won’t have racial equality in the United States until we see greater diversity at every level of the energy sector from labor to ownership.
Oil, reconstruction, and the rise of white supremacy in America
The history of the United States comes down to racism and oil. Perhaps more than any other American industry, the oil industry is an insider’s club.
Most of the “old money” in Texas can be traced to the oil boom of the 1930s; much of the “new money” was derived from natural gas — Jessica Smartt Gullion
Energy makes the nation go, so the oil industry has a unique relationship with the government. In a practical sense, the oil industry is the government. Energy is vital for basic commerce and national defense. This is one of those industries that is too big and too important to fail.
The oil industry wields enormous power, and their operating ideology was forged in the reconstruction era.
[T]he historical record reveals clear links between white supremacy and the oil industry. According to [Notre Dame historian Darren Dochuk’s] research, when crude oil was discovered in the hills of northwestern Pennsylvania just prior to the Civil War, it was seen “as a mystical fount that might ease America out of bloodshed and into a new age of peace and prosperity. Oil was to be a healing balm for the body politic.”
But this healing balm was intended for “whites only,” and that wasn’t just because in that era few Black people lived in the communities where oil was first extracted. As the industry shifted west and south at the turn of the 20th century, to Texas, California, and Mexico, it collided with the emergence of the “Lost Cause” mythos across the South, a set of pseudo-historical justifications for slavery as a just system in which the enslaved were happy, and the Civil War was a heroic insurrection to protect the South’s “economic prosperity” from “Northern aggression.” — Kendra Pierre-Louis
Oil is an old and powerful industry that continues to be influenced by traces of an ideology forged during the racist norms of the reconstruction era.
Evidence of racism in the modern oil industry
Racist thinking remains a social norm until there is a deliberate effort to normalize a more equitable worldview. Unfortunately, few efforts have been made to bring greater diversity to the American oil industry.
In the mid-1980s the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission tried to address one large case of racism and sexism involving a union — Pipeliners Local 798 based in Tulsa, Okla. The union is a big player in the pipeline construction business. It dispatches welders and their helpers to large projects across much of the U.S…
…Charles Simpson joined the union and says that despite the federal oversight, he experienced racism on a regular basis.
“You’d walk down the pipe and see epithets ‘n***** go home’ scribbled on the pipe,” says Simpson. He also says nooses were left for him and other black co-workers to find — Kendra Pierre-Louis
The American oil industry was born with the belief that the profits of oil belonged to the white community. Vestiges of that belief can be seen to this day in the industry’s hiring practices.
The oil and gas industry workforce is generally less diverse than American workforce as a whole, and African Americans are especially underrepresented — Amy Harder
The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 was about stealing oil from the Black community
Some of you may have taken note of the mention of Tulsa, Oklahoma in the previous example. The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was among the most horrific atrocities ever committed on American soil.
The event, as with much that is related to white supremacy, does not receive the critical attention it deserves. However, the added insult to the injury of the Tulsa Race Massacre is that it helped establish the white dominance of the American oil industry that still exists to this day.
By rights, the Black community should have a foothold in American oil. The reason they do not is because white supremacists led a massacre, stole property, and were never held accountable.
How the Black community came to own land in Tulsa can probably be attributed to the U.S. Government’s racist attitude toward Native Americans.
After the Civil War, the U.S. government forced all five of the slaveholding Indian nations to free their slaves and give them forty acres of land — Alaina Roberts
This stipulation was probably conceived of as a way to punish the Indian nations rather than out of any real consideration for the Black community. At the time, nobody knew that these lands were oil rich.
U.S. treaties compelled five slave-owning tribes — the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Muscogee Creek and Seminoles — to share tribal land and other resources and rights with freed Black people who had been enslaved…
…And while some tribes reputedly gave their Black members some of the worst, rockiest, unfarmable land, that was often just where drillers struck oil starting in the first years of the 20th century, before statehood changed Indian Territory to Oklahoma in 1907. For a time it made the area around Tulsa the world’s biggest oil producer — Ellen Knickmeyer
Remember that the oil industry was born out of the racist belief that the benefits of oil were for “whites only.”
To this day, we can observe many instances of conservative groups organizing violent attacks. These attacks happen when these groups perceive a completely fabricated assault on their delusional concept of racial autonomy. The January 6th insurrection is the most recent example.
The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre happened, in part, because an entitled group of racist whites determined that the Black community could not be allowed to have any influence over the American oil industry.
Think about that every time the modern oil industry takes advantage of a humanitarian crisis as an excuse to raise gas prices. There is no competition in the oil industry. It is not a free market. The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre is one of the historical events that allowed white people to control American oil.
The oil industry has a disproportionate influence on politics
It’s not implausible to suggest that the energy crisis that took place during Jimmy Carter’s presidency was deliberately created to derail the policies of a progressive president. Today, right-wing media is content to blame President Biden for increased prices at the pump, even though oil companies are showing record profits.
The oil industry exerts its influence on our government in many ways.
Rather than the government calling the shots in the interest of the public, the oil lobby — led by the American Petroleum Institute (API), Western Energy Alliance (WEA), and the National Ocean Industries Association — is using a rigged system to write the rules in their favor. Instead of acting on climate change as President Biden was elected to do, the oil lobby has created a situation where the agencies are catering to the industry rather than the American people — Jenny Rowland-Shea and Zainab Mirza
Right-wing hostility towards individuals such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her ‘Green New Deal’ can be attributed to a perceived threat to the energy monopoly currently held by the American oil industry.
Any progress in reducing the absolute control the American oil industry wields over our nation’s access to energy will significantly assist marginalized communities.
When there is free market competition and access to alternative forms of energy, the oil industry will not be able to push back against progressive policies through the creation of the kind of artificial inflation which comes from energy price fixing.
The oil industry knows this, this is why progressive politicians are the target of constant, brutal propaganda.
One of the most racist industries in a racist nation
Most Americans are content to remain ignorant to the true realities of the world. Many Americans have never even heard of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Many Americans are content to assume that gas prices are simply a result of natural market fluctuations.
However, there are key pieces of evidence that suggest this is not the case. The oil industry workforce shows a deplorable lack of diversity. The media acts as if higher gas prices are inevitable, but the oil industry also boasts about record profits.
The energy supply, like the food supply, is fundamentally essential to the survival of a nation. Energy represents an industry that’s so inherently powerful, it can exert an oppressive influence on the life of every citizen.
The unfortunate reality of the American energy sector is that it has its ideological roots in reconstruction era racism. Our nation will not be able to make significant progress in the removal of institutionalized oppression until we achieve greater diversity in the ownership and labor participation at every level of the energy sector.
There is evidence to suggest that the power of American energy is being leveraged to exploit marginalized people. If you’re looking for a mechanism of oppression, look no further than the oil industry.
Think about that the next time gas prices rise. Also keep in mind that the gasoline refined from Tulsa crude oil rightfully belongs to the Black community.
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