Price’s astroturf roll of the dice

Pamela Price is citing the support of something called “Black Wall Street USA” (BWSUSA) in her effort to avoid being recalled. Her latest email blast contains BWSUSA’s logo filling the entire computer screen, and begins: “This week in a powerful statement, the National Black Wall Street USA organization condemned the effort to overturn the November 2022 election and nullify the people's vote less than 2 years into my term.”

I’ll bet dollars to donuts most voters, including Black voters, don’t know what Black Wall Street USA is. Let me explain. The term “Black Wall Street” is often used to describe the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where in 1921 a White-on-Black riot occurred that resulted in the deaths of 300 people and thirty-five blocks of the Black neighborhood going up in flames. It was sort of a precursor of the Rodney King riots of 1992.

The notion of “Black Wall Street” has gotten a lot of attention as a historical meme in the last few years, with the (mostly liberal) media reporting on it as a seminal event in our nation’s long, sad story of racial disharmony. The Black community has embraced the memory of that long-ago event, using it as a stimulus for current activism.

But there’s a huge difference between the historical Black Wall Street event, and the political organization known as Black Wall Street USA. The latter seems to have nothing to do with the former, except to have appropriated its name, in order to evoke a sympathetic response and grow its donations. An examination of Black Wall Street USA’s website doesn’t really provide useful information. The website is riddled with grammar, punctuation and other errors. The organization claims its emphasis in four vague areas: “Spiritual” matters, “Women,” “Health” and “Africa.” There seems to be a connection to the recent movement toward creating Black arts or business districts in several American cities, although it’s unclear whether or not BWSUSA has anything to do with the Black Arts Movement Business District that the Oakland City Council created by fiat in 2016.

Why is Price citing BWSUSA? Because she’ll use anything she can get, even something as astroturf as BWSUSA. We have to remember that Price is scared. Nobody is really supporting her, beyond a handful of preachers and some radical race grievance types. I’m told her internal polling shows her going down in flames. With all the local police departments against her, with Eric Swalwell calling for her recall, with even Gov. Newsom letting it be known “reading in between the lines” that Price is an incompetent fraud, Price’s recall seems to be a lock. She’s desperate for the support of anything, even so fringe a thing as Black Wall Street USA.

It’s ironic, isn’t it, that Price has been doing everything in her power to make sure that Oakland’s Black population will never have the wealth or power that the phrase “Black Wall Street” implies. Far from being Black Wall Street, Oakland has turned into Skid Row. Price is greatly responsible for this, along with her fellow race grifters, Sheng Thao, Carroll Fife and Nikki Bas, all of whom we can get rid of on November 5.

Steve Heimoff