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A culture of self-censorship and fear of backlash from funders, colleagues and the public is convincing arts and cultural workers to stay silent on important issues, according to new research from ArtsProfessional.

APs Freedom of Expression survey has uncovered pressures on arts workers ability to speak out ranging from the fear of harassment and humiliation to more overt measures like non-disclosure agreements. More than 500 artists and arts workers contributed some 60,000 words on questions about their experiences navigating controversy and coercion.

The research indicates the openness, risk and rebellion that many believe characterises the sector is being eroded. While about 90% of respondents agreed that the arts and cultural sector has a responsibility to use its unique talents to speak out about things that matter, regardless of the potential consequences, more than 80% thought that workers in the arts and cultural sector who share controversial opinions risk being professionally ostracised.

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While much of the sectors censorship is self-imposed, one in six respondents said they had been offered a financial settlement in exchange for their silence on circumstances an organisation wanted to keep private.ArtsProfessional Editor Amanda Parker said the research reveals a deep division between public perception and the reality of working in the arts and cultural sector.

Our survey shines a damning light on the coercion, bullying, intimidation and intolerance that is active among a community that thinks of itself as liberal, open minded and equitable.

We are very aware that this research doesnt reflect all views, but its a sad and timely indication of the suppressed hurt and anger felt by many, despite the loud and growing conversations about collaboration and inclusiveness.

The sector is biting its tongue for fear of biting the hand that feeds, the survey shows.

Nearly 70% of respondents said they would not criticise a funder for fear of jeopardising future investment and 40% said they had been subject to pressure from funders for speaking out.

There was a sense that funders are immune from scrutiny, with respondents citing times they kept quiet about waste and cronyism, among other issues. One described the relationships with funders as being like a parent and child: Its hard to challenge or open up a dialogue with them even if there are genuine concerns.

Criticising a funders decision to award or turn down a grant or their continued support of elitist organisations would be a problem for many. Responses on this issue largely fell into two camps: those who felt the sector was only paying lip service to diversity and those who thought it attracted too much attention but neither group felt able to speak their minds.

Pressure to keep quiet was most likely to come from colleagues, according to two-thirds of respondents. However, the survey also revealed examples of retribution from organisations against arts workers who spoke their minds, from marginalisation and isolation to lost commissions, cancelled contracts and being screamed, shouted at [and] bullied by my ex-boss.

Some workplaces censor their employees online activity while others actively gag them: One in six respondents said they had been offered money if they signed a non-disclosure agreement.

One person said they had been offered money to keep quiet about corrupt practices in arts funding at the EU level; a whistleblower who told top management about mostly male bosses bullying their female subordinates was paid off and invited to leave the organisation. Another respondent accepted a redundancy package when the redundancy wasn't wholly legal; and one person reported a gagging order regarding a colleagues sexual harassment case and a boards illegal processes.

The research indicates the arts and cultural sector is intolerant of viewpoints outside of the dominant norms. Anything that might be considered politically incorrect to the liberal-leaning sector including expressing support or sympathy for Brexit, the Conservatives or other right-wing political parties was felt to be risky territory.

Religion, gender and sexuality were also considered a minefield and no-go areas for many: Anything to do with gender issues, especially trans issues, will get a lot of flak for either not being on message enough, or being off message, or too on message, one person said.

More than three-quarters of respondents said workers who share controversial opinions risk being professionally ostracised. One person commented that people working in the sector are nowhere near as open as they pretend to be, there is a lot of hiding and backstabbing.

Only 40% of respondents agreed that personal views and opinions are met with respect by others working in the arts & cultural sector, and 42% said they feel free to speak publicly whether in person or online about their personal views on issues affecting the arts sector.

One person commented that it wouldnt be advisable to point out that the arts tend to do well under the Tories.

The dangers of this culture of self-censorship was summarised by another respondent:

Our arts, culture, and indeed education sectors are supposed to be fearlessly free-thinking and open to a wide range of challenging views. However, they are now dominated by a monolithic politically correct class (mostly of privileged white middle class people, by the way), who impose their intolerant views across those sectors.

This is driving people who disagree away, risks increasing support for the very things this culturally dominant class professes to stand against, and is slowly destroying our society and culture from the inside.

This culture of censorship is also affecting artistic expression and programming decisions. While four in five respondents agreed that organisations that wont risk controversy wont deliver the most exciting creative work, they also recognised the pressure on organisations. Only a third felt their boards were being unduly cautious about potentially controversial work.

But 45% had been pressurised, intimidated, ostracised, coerced, trolled, harassed or bullied, either in person or on digital media over their artistic and creative activities. Of that group, 44% had changed their product, programming or plans due to this pressure.

Negative public reaction can shut down free speech there is a culture of inviting and then overreacting to complaints when in fact they represent a tiny proportion of views, one person commented and cause artists to self-censor, the survey shows. Artists fear damaging their reputations or those of their organisations.

One person explained it as a matter of picking battles.

I sometimes have to weigh whether what I really need to say requires the element that will turn others away. If it is important to me, I will stick to my plan, but sometimes, it is not the most important thing and I choose to tame my ideas. I have felt like a traitor to my own self-expression, but I have to ask if anyone needs to hear from me at all.

Read theFreedom of Expression report, including over 1,000 comments and personal testimonies relating to freedom of expression in the arts and cultural sector.

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EXCLUSIVE: 'Culture of censorship' as arts workers fear backlash - ArtsProfessional

Decentraland is an Ethereum-based game which basically puts Second Life on the blockchain. It raised a snappy $20 million during the ICO boom of 2017 and has now finally launched.

Decentraland's value proposition for users is quintessentially blockchain-ey. It's a lot like Second Life, except you get to personally own your digital assets, everything in the virtual world is measurably scarce, and the world is decentralised and censorship resistant.

While Second Life saw the robust exchange of all kinds of digital goods, the digital property ladder is currently where the real money is in Decentraland.

As a slice of decentralised digital paradise, it's operated by a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), which is functionally intended to bring a degree of censorship resistance and transparent democracy to the new digital world.

Decentraland raises all kinds of fascinating questions around governance, DAOs, accountability, censorship and ownership of digital assets, all of which are nicely exemplified in two simple questions: what happens if someone builds an 800 foot high swastika on their land and what will that do to property prices?

Anecdotally, and by observing other digital communities, we can see that a healthy amount of self-censorship isn't always a bad thing. A laissez faire approach to free speech often leads to echo chambers and less diversity of opinion in online communities.

This is because people prefer to seek like-minded company, and if a community proves to be sufficiently offensive, members will simply go somewhere else. This leaves behind a same-minded group of people. This is why completely unmoderated Internet bastions of free speech tend to veer towards extremist fringes over time.

Decentraland isn't like other online communities though, for several reasons.

One is that it's decentralised. It has no real central points of power, except the smart contracts themselves. No one can unilaterally decide to take the world a specific direction. Another is that it has a democratic governance structure.

And a third one is that the community has a direct, shared financial incentive to try to improve property prices. This is best done by growing the Decentraland userbase, which is probably best done by fostering a more inclusive online community. More directly, getting the website banned or blocked in certain countries wouldn't be good for its growth.

The end result is that the DAO, which we'll go ahead and call the HOA from here on, has a strong motivation to demolish that 800 foot eyesore. But is this even possible?

Before the offending structure can be demolished, the property it's on will probably need to be somehow confiscated or bought out. If ownership of the land and the ability to build on it is dependent on private key possession, the community is unable to unilaterally agree to confiscate it. Basically, the owner of the land physically holds the digital land.

The Decentraland web host can't just remove or blot out the structure either, as the Decentraland world is hosted across a series of independent nodes called Catalysts.

There may be some legal recourse though, assuming the offending creator is even identifiable. The Decentraland terms of use clearly say you shouldn't do anything illegal on the platform. However, any questions around the legality of building an 800 foot swastika depend on where the builder is located.

If they're in the US, its construction would almost certainly be protected as free speech. Incidentally, that's why hate websites are typically hosted in the US. Note that this is not legal, financial or architectural advice.

It's possible, given how decentralised and censorship-resistant the place is, that the HOA or another party will need to buy out the land from the swastika owner before it can be demolished. As such, it may be possible for an unscrupulous free speech enthusiast to take advantage of this by buying land cheaply, building something wildly offensive on it, and then refusing to sell the land at anything except an inflated price.

The HOA has a $10 million treasury, but that won't last long if it has to be spent exercising eminent domain.

The Decentraland community and governance structure no doubt has lots of interesting challenges ahead of it. One of the subtler ones may be trying to develop a culture of practical, democratic self-censorship in a censorship-resistant world, and building the tools to enforce this.

Disclosure: The author holds BNB, BTC at the time of writing.

Disclaimer: This information should not be interpreted as an endorsement of cryptocurrency or any specific provider, service or offering. It is not a recommendation to trade. Cryptocurrencies are speculative, complex and involve significant risks they are highly volatile and sensitive to secondary activity. Performance is unpredictable and past performance is no guarantee of future performance. Consider your own circumstances, and obtain your own advice, before relying on this information. You should also verify the nature of any product or service (including its legal status and relevant regulatory requirements) and consult the relevant Regulators' websites before making any decision. Finder, or the author, may have holdings in the cryptocurrencies discussed.

Picture: Shutterstock

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Opinion: Decentraland will have to build a culture of self-censorship - finder.com.au

The Chinese professor Xu Zhangrun, who published a rare public critique of President Xi Jinping over Chinas coronavirus crisis, was placed under house arrest for days, barred from social media and is now cut off from the internet, his friends have told the Guardian.

Xus passionate attack on the governments system of controls and censorship, Viral Alarm: When Fury Overcomes Fear, was published this month a rare, bold expression of dissent from the liberal camp under Xis rule.

A friend of Xus who spoke on Sunday on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals said police placed Xu under house arrest soon after he returned to Beijing from his lunar new year break at his home town in Anhui province.

They confined him at home under the pretext that he had to be quarantined after the trip, the friend said. He was in fact under de facto house arrest and his movements were restricted.

During those days, at least two people stood guard in front of his house around the clock and a car with a signal box was parked in front of his residence. Security agents also went into his house to issue warnings to him, the friend said.

Those restrictions were lifted late last week, but his internet connection has been cut off since Friday, the friend added.

He tried to get it mended but found out that his IP [internet protocol address] has been blocked. He lives on the outskirts of Beijing and is far away from shops and other services. Under the current [coronavirus] situation, things are very difficult for him.

Friends say that since publication, Xus account has been suspended on WeChat, a Chinese messaging app, and many have been unable to get in touch with him for days. His name has been scrubbed from Weibo, a Twitter-like microblog, with only articles from official websites several years ago showing up on the countrys biggest search engine, Baidu. Calls to his mobile phone went unanswered on Sunday.

Phone calls to the Ministry of Public Security also went unanswered on Sunday. The staff member who answered the phone at Changping branch of Beijing Public Security Bureau said she had no knowledge of Xu.

Another friend who also spoke on the condition of anonymity had managed to correspond with him through text messages but said his situation was worrying. I fear he might be under surveillance, said this friend. He has not directly responded (to my queries) but just told me not to worry.

When Xu published his essay, he warned that he was likely to be punished. He said he had already been suspended from teaching and had freedoms curtailed over critiques published nearly a year earlier.

I can now all too easily predict that I will be subjected to new punishments; indeed, this may well even be the last piece I write, he wrote at the end of his latest essay.

Xus criticism of the countrys leadership came shortly before a widespread debate on freedom of speech convulsed the country. The death on 7 February of whistleblowing doctor Li Wenliang, who had tried to warn colleagues about the virus but was reprimanded and silenced by security forces, triggered an outpouring of grief and anger and an unusual public discussion about censorship.

Lis death has thoroughly exposed the ills of the partys governance and control; this has a huge impact on peoples minds, said Hong Zhenkuai, an independent historian who is currently working outside China, as a visiting scholar at Tokyo University.

The mechanisms that normally constrain Chinese journalists have also eased slightly, with some of the most powerful stories about life in quarantined Wuhan and the latest news about the evolution of the outbreak coming from mainland newsrooms like that of magazine Caixin.

But public anger over censorship, and the particular circumstances of a national emergency, should not be mistaken for any fundamental change within the Chinese Communist party, which has been honing its ability to control the national conversation for decades, activists and intellectuals say.

In a further reminder of the governments strict controls, two citizen journalists who were reporting from the epicentre of Chinas coronavirus outbreak have vanished this week, apparently detained.

The Chinese military surgeon who exposed the governments cover-up of the Sars outbreak in 2002-2003 has been under de facto house arrest since last year, the Guardian revealed this month. Detention came after he wrote to the top leadership asking for a reassessment of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement.

There is no space for speech freedom in China now, said Hong. The impacts on the individuals are multi-faceted. Economically, they would cut off your livelihood [academics get fired, writers cant publish and no one dares hire you]. You would get sidelined by mainstream society, youd lose friends and, worse than that, you might lose your personal freedoms, so a number of intellectual elites have chosen to leave China.

Since he took power in late 2012, Xi has tightened ideological control and suppressed civil freedoms across the nation, reversing a trend under his predecessor to give Chinese media some limited scope to expose and report regional corruption and lower-level officials misdeeds.

Even within the Communist party, cadres are threatened with disciplinary action for expressing opinions that differ from the leadership.

Under Xis crackdown on speech and academic freedoms, a number of prominent liberal intellectuals, journalists, rights lawyers and NGO workers have either been silenced, jailed or escaped abroad.

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This may be the last piece I write: prominent Xi critic has internet cut after house arrest - The Guardian

Yesterday, the Attorney General held a workshop on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The question was whether the law can be improved. Section 230 does need work, though there's plenty of room for debate about exactly how to fix it. These are my mostly tentative and entirely personal thoughts on the question the Attorney General has asked.

Section 230 gives digital platforms two immunities one for publishing users' speech and one for censoring users' speech. the second is the bigger problem.

When section 230 was adopted, the impossibility of AOL, say, monitoring its users in a wholly effective way was obvious. It couldn't afford to hire tens of thousands of humans to police what was said in its chatrooms, and the easy digital connection it offered was so magical that no one wanted it to be saddled with such costs. Section 230 was an easy sell.

A lot has changed since 1996. Facebook and other have in fact already hired tens of thousands of humans to police what is said on their platforms. Combined with artificial intelligence, content fingerprinting, and more, these monitors work with considerable success to stamp out certain kinds of speech. And although none of these efforts are foolproof, preventing the worst online abuses has become part of what we expect from social media. The sweeping immunity Congress granted in Section 230 is as dated as the Macarena, another hit from 1996 whose appeal seems inexplicable today. Today, jurisdictions as similar to ours as the United Kingdom and the European Union have abandoned such broad grants of immunity, making it clear that they will severely punish any platform that fails to censor its users promptly.

That doesn't mean the US should follow the same path. We don't need a special, harsher form of liability for big tech companies. But why are we still giving them a blanket immunity from ordinary tort liability for the acts of third parties? In particular, why should they be immune from liability for utterly predictable criminal use of warrant-proof encryption? I've written on this recently and won't repeat what I said there, except to make one fundamental point.

Immunity from tort liability is a subsidy, one we often give to nascent industries that capture the nation's imagination. But once they've grown big, and the harm they can cause has grown as well, that immunity has to be justified anew. In the case of warrant-proof encryption, the justifications are thin. Section 230 allows tech companies to capture all the profits to be made from encrypting their services while exempting them from the costs they are imposing on underfunded police forces and victims of crime.

That is not how our tort law usually works. Usually, courts impose liability on the party that is in the best position to minimize the harm a new product can cause. Here, that's the company that designs and markets an encryption system with predictable impact on victims of crime. Many believe that the security value of unbreakable encryption outweighs the cost to crime victims and law enforcement. Maybe so. But why leave the weighing of those costs to the blunt force and posturing of political debate? Why not decentralize and privatize that debate by putting the costs of encryption on the same company that is reaping its benefits? If the benefits outweigh the costs, the company can use its profits to insure itself and the victims of crime against the costs. Or it can seek creative technical solutions that maximize security without protecting criminals solutions that will never emerge from a political debate. Either way it's a private decision with few externalities, and the company that does the best job will end up with the most net revenue. That's the way tort law usually works, and it's hard to see why we shouldn't take the same tack for encryption.

2. Immunity for censoring users Detecting bias.

The harder and more urgent Section 230 problem is what to do about Silicon Valley's newfound enthusiasm for censoring users whose views it disapproves of. I confess to being a conservative, whatever that means these days, and I have little doubt that social media content mediation rules are biased against conservative speech. This is hard to prove, of course, in part because social media has a host of ways to disadvantage speakers who are unpopular in the Valley. Their posts can be quarantined, so that only the speaker and a few persistent followers ever see them but none knows of that distribution has been suppressed. Or they can be demonetized, so that Valley-unpopular speakers, even those with large followings, cannot use ad funding to expand their reach. Or facially neutral rules, such as prohibitions on doxing or encouraging harassment, are applied with maximum force only to the unpopular. Combined with the utterly opaque talk-to-the-bot mechanisms for appeal that the Valley has embraced, these tools allow even one or two low-level but highly motivated content moderators to sabotage their target's speech.

Artificial intelligence won't solve this problem. It is likely to make it worse. AI is famous for imitating the biases of the decisionmakers it learns from and for then being conveniently incapable of explaining how it arrived at its own decisions. No conservative should have much faith in a machine that learns its content moderation lessons from current practice in Silicon Valley.

Foreign government interference. European governments, unbound by the first amendment, have not been shy about telling Silicon Valley to suppress speech it dislikes, which include true facts about people who claim a right to be forgotten, or charges that a politician belongs to a fascist party, or what it calls hate speech. Indeed, much of the Valley has already surrendered, agreeing to use their terms of service to enforce Europe's sweeping view of hate speechunder which the President's tweets and the Attorney General's speeches could probably be banned today.

Europe is not alone in its determination to limit what Americans can say and read. Baidu has argued successfully that it has a first amendment right to return nothing but sunny tourist pictures when Americans searched for "Tiananmen Square June 1989." Jian Zhang v. Baidu.Com Inc., 10 F. Supp. 3d 433 (S.D.N.Y. 2014). Today, any government but ours is free to order a US company to suppress the speech of Americans the government doesn't like.

In the long run it is dangerous for American democracy to give highly influential social media firms a blanket immunity when they bow to foreign government pressure and suppress the speech of Americans. We need to armor ourselves against such tactics, not facilitate them.

Regulation deserves another look. This isn't the first time we've faced a disruptive new technology that changed the way Americans talked to each other. The rise of broadcasting a hundred years ago was at least at transformational, and as threatening to the political order, as social media today. It played a big role in the success of Hitler and Mussolini, not to mention FDR and Father Coughlin.

American politicians worried that radio and television owners could sway popular opinion in unpredictable or irresponsible ways. They responded with a remarkable barrage of new regulation all designed to ensure that wealthy owners of the disruptive technology did not use it to unduly distort the national dialogue. Broadcasters were required to get government licenses, not once but over and over again. Foreign interests were denied the right to own stations or networks. A "fairness" doctrine required that broadcasters present issues in an honest, equitable, and balanced way. Opposing candidates for office had to be given equal air time, and political ads could to be aired at the lowest commercial rate. Certain words (at least seven) could not be said on the radio.

This entire edifice of regulation has acquired a disreputable air in elite circles, and some of it has been repealed. Frankly, though, it don't look so bad compared to having a billionaire tech bro (or his underpaid contract workers) decide that carpenters communicating with friends in Sioux Falls are forbidden to "deadname" Chelsea Manning or to complain about Congress's failure to subpoena Eric Ciaramella.

The sweeping broadcast regulatory regime that reached its peak in the 1950s was designed to prevent a few rich people from using technology to seize control of the national conversation, and it worked. The regulatory elements all pretty much passed constitutional muster, and the worst that can be said about them today is that they made public discourse mushy and bland because broadcasters were cautious about contradicting views held by a substantial part of the American public.

Viewed from 2020, that doesn't sound half bad. We might be better off, and less divided, if social media platforms were more cautious today about suppressing views held by a substantial part of the American public.

Whether all these rules would survive contemporary first amendment review is hard to know. But government action to protect the speech of the many from the censorship of the privileged deserves, and gets, more leeway from the courts than the free speech absolutists would have you believe. See, e.g., Bartnicki v. Vopper, 532 U.S. 514 (2001).

That said, regulation has many risks, not least the risk of abuse. Each political party in our divided country ought to ask what the other party would do if given even more power over what can be said on line. It's a reason to look elsewhere for solutions.

Network effects and competitive dominance. Maybe we wouldn't need a lot of regulation to protect minority views if there were more competition in social media if those who don't like a particular platform's censorship rules could go elsewhere to express their views.

In practice, they can't. YouTube dominates video platforms, Facebook dominates social platforms, Amazon dominates online book sales, etc. Thanks to network effects, if you want to spread your views by book, by video, or by social media post, you have to use their platforms and live with their censorship regimes.

It's hard to say without investigation whether these platforms have violated antitrust laws in acquiring their dominance or in exercising it. But the effect of that dominance on what Americans can say to each other, and thus on political outcomes, must be part of any antitrust review of their impact. Antitrust enforcement often turns on whether a competitive practice causes consumer harm, and suppression of consumer speech has not usually been seen as such a harm. It should be. Suppression of speech it dislikes may well be one way Silicon Valley takes monopoly profits in something other than cash. If so, there could hardly be a higher priority for antitrust enforcement because such a use of monopoly strikes at the heart of American free speech values.

One word of caution: Breaking up dominant platforms in the hope of spurring a competition of ideas won't work if the result is to turn the market over to Chinese companies that already have a similar scale and even less interest in fostering robust debate online. If we're going to spur competition in social media, we need to make sure we aren't trading Silicon Valley censorship for the Chinese brand.

Transparency. Transparency is everyone's favorite first step for addressing the reality and the perception of bias in content moderation. Surely if the rules were clearer, if the bans and demonetizations could be challenged, if inconsistencies could be forced into the light and corrected, we'd all be less angry and suspicious and the companies would behave more fairly. I tend to agree with that sentiment, but we shouldn't kid ourselves. If the rules are made public, if the procedures are made more open hell, if the platforms just decide to have people answer complaints instead of leaving that to Python scriptsthe cost will be enormous.

And not just in money. All of the rules, all of the procedures, can be gamed, and more effectively the more transparent they are. Speakers with bad intent will go to the very edge of the rules; they will try to swamp the procedures. And ideologues among the content moderators will still have room to seize on technicalities to nuke unpopular speakers. Transparency may well be a good idea, but its flaws are going to be painful to behold if that's the direction our effort to discipline Section 230 takes.

3. What is to be done?

So I don't have much certainty to offer. But if I were dealing with the Section 230 speech suppression immunity today, I'd start with something like the following:

First, treat speech suppression as an antitrust problem, asking what can be done to create more competition, especially ideological and speech competition, among social media platforms. Maybe breakups would work, although network effects are remarkably resilient. Maybe there are ways antitrust law can be used to regulate monopolistic suppression of speech. In that regard, the most promising measures probably are requiring further transparency and procedural fairness from the speech suppression machinery, perhaps backed up by governmental subpoenas to investigate speech suppression accusations.

Second, surely everyone can agree that foreign governments and billionaires shouldn't play a role in deciding what Americans can say to each other. We need to bar foreign ownership of social media platforms that are capable of playing a large role in our political dialogue. We should also use the Foreign Agent Registration Act or something like it to require that speech driven by foreign governments be prominently identified as such. And we should sanction the nations that try to do that.

And finally, here's a no-brainer. If nothing else, it's clear that Section 230 is one of the most controversial laws on the books. It is unlikely to go another five years without being substantially amended. So why in God's name are we writing the substance of Section 230 into free trade deals notably the USMCA? Adding Section 230 to a free trade treaty makes the law a kind of a low-rent constitutional amendment, since if we want to change it in future, organized tech lobbies and our trading partners will claim that we're violating international law. Why would we do this to ourselves? It's surely time for this administration to take Section 230 out of its standard free-trade negotiating package.

Note: I have many friends, colleagues, and clients who will disagree with much of what I say here. Don't blame them. These are my views, not those of my clients, my law firm, or anyone else.

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What Should We Do About Section 230? - Reason

Censorship is a dangerous concept to mess with, but legislators in Oklahoma feel differently.

Educators in Oklahoma have recently added teachings about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre to their history curriculum, one of the most important racially motivated riots. Alongside Red Summer 1919, Detroit 1943, the Dr. Martin Luther King assassination riots of 1968 and the infamous Rodney King riots of 1992, it is neglectful of Oklahoma educators to only now start teaching about the Tulsa Race Massacre.

With the new curriculum, superintendents will provide age-appropriate materials and resources to aid teachers in discussing the massacre. The lessons will apply to all schools state-wide from elementary to high school.

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre started when a black teenager named Dick Rowland entered an elevator. The white elevator operator, Sarah Page, screamed, and Rowland fled the scene. Police arrested Rowland under the pretense that he had assaulted Page.

In such a segregated community as Tulsa, word traveled fast, and an angry, white mob gathered in front of the courthouse with weapons. They began to fire at the black protesters showing up to the courthouse in support of Rowland. It was then that the white residents of Tulsa began to terrorize the black community of Greenwood, a neighborhood of Tulsa. According to the 2001 report from the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, it was estimated between 100 and 300 people were killed, but only 39 people were confirmed.

As a major part of Oklahomas history, it is disheartening to learn that only now educators want to embed the massacre into their curriculum. The massacre is not only important to the states history, but African-American history as well. That sort of change is relevant to my recent column in that the American education system keeps shortchanging minority history.

Cutting out significant minority events is disrespectful and shows that their history does not matter. All history is important and is what shapes the world, but minority history is the foundation of America and needs to be discussed exactly the way it occurred. Every gory detail needs to be addressed so people will truly understand.

The censorship of the massacre could be because of Oklahomas embarrassment about the event since the massacre cultivated the rise of white supremacy in Oklahoma. Although a horrific moment in history, censoring students education is unacceptable because it leaves them unprepared for important dialogue about race.

There are congratulations due to the education system in Oklahoma, since they have finally decided to discuss such a significant event in their state and African-American history. Although that change only occurred because of Black History Month, congratulations are still in order because they are taking the first step to better inform students about all types of history and not only white history.

Iana Fields is a freshman studying English creative writing at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. Want to talk to Iana? Tweet her @FieldsIana.

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Here's the Tea: It's time to start telling the truth in history class - The Post