He's a wise Republican who serves great food. His strong opinions got him kicked off Tulsa talk radio

Story no. 7 from my 35,000 mile roadtrip into the early pandemic. Here, a Tulsa man talks about patriotism and race and the virus as that fascinating city prepares to explode. Mid June, 2020.

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Ty Walker has a lot on his mind

I bumped into a serious looking man as he exited the Black barber shop on Black Wall Street. His name was Ty Walker. He was strong, grounded, wearing a bright blue polo shirt. Walker owned a nearby restaurant where some of his 6 daughters worked. He was Tulsan to the core, and in the middle of a long-odds run for mayor. As a military veteran he was moralistic and had standards. As a politician, he was patriotic, but very careful with his words. As for the virus, it didn’t bother him. He’d spent years working on an Oklahoma pig farm and figured that he’d been exposed to so much mud and muck that no virus would want to tangle with his immune system. He didn’t know a single person who’d gotten sick with COVID-19.

Walker was so angered by the coronavirus restrictions on restaurants that he’d been banned from a local talk radio station for calling in over and over with an attitude. He couldn’t accept that restaurants were being shut down, while other businesses, such as grocery stores, were allowed to remain open.

“I felt it was arbitrary. To be arbitrary about another man’s livelihood is not right,” he told me.

His own restaurant’s revenue dropped 45 percent during shelter in place. Fortunately, he could weather the disaster. Over 40 years of working in the business had taught him to always be prepared, because things can get sour quickly.

He was expecting a big Juneteenth crowd in the neighborhood, and he was glad because it would help the younger generation learn about their community, keep traditions alive.

“I look at it like this,” he said. “Black lives have always mattered. Before they started saying black lives matter, they mattered since the beginning of time. In all honesty, the United States was really built off the backs of the black man. I feel we are at a changing point in society.”

Walker’s voice got deeper as he spoke, more confident with each sentence. He suggested that change would come through people’s hearts and actions.

“There is no law that can be wrote on any man’s paper with any man’s ink that can take the evil out of another man’s heart. You can’t legislate that. It's never gonna happen.”

What did he think about the president’s rally happening on the same weekend as the Greenwood and Juneteenth gatherings?

“Well, I voted for the president. I trust him,” he said.

This startled me because I’d stereotyped him: Black man equals Democrat.

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“I’m a military man and I understand the respect I should have for my leader. At the end of the day, if you can’t respect your leader, then when you become a leader, of your family or whatever, you won’t get their respect. It’s biblical, really: what goes around comes around. So, if you speak unkindly of your leader, even if it is true, it is going to come back on you.”

Was he going to attend the rally? No.

“I don’t wanna go because I am a man and I might react,” he said, laughing at the thought of the rally. “And Lord behold, if somebody digs at me or hits me upside the head or throws something at me, ha ha, I don’t want to respond. I don’t want to see that.”

“So, you’re worried that some of the president’s followers might not like a Black man at the rally?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Look, I love this country,” he said. “To be one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all, we all have to believe that. Because at the end of the day, when it really comes down to it, this really is the greatest place in the whole wide world – the United States of America.”

Ty was about my age, and I could relate to this sentiment of America the greatest. I’d tried arguing this case before with Europeans living in New York, South Americans, and my own children, without much impact.

“You and I see a different world,” Violet once told me. “We see a different America.”

Slowly, I’d come to see a different America too. In books like 1491, The Heart of Wounded Knee, I’d found reason to question history. In conversations with my kids, I’d come to see that America, had a much darker side than I’d ever truly accepted, even after coming of age in the 70s. Ty knew this, and he didn’t learn it from a book. Still, as I always had, he took refuge in the myths of unwavering exceptionalism we’d been taught throughout our lives. For many of us, those myths were still so hard to shake.

Walking to my truck I stopped to listen to three Indigenous and one Black musician play traditional Pawnee music on the sidewalk. The group was led by a Pawnee-Seminole rhythmist named Cenc. His hair was cut very close to the scalp around a tight man bun. A small crowd listened respectfully. Cenc told me the music offered healing for the upcoming days of contention.

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