Because it's 2017 and we have to be aware of this stuff.
On a day when Richmond woke up to Klansmen effigies hung in Bryant Park, how better to finish it than watching a documentary about the militarization of our police forces?
In conjunction with the Created Equal Film series, the VCU Southern Film Festival was showing the 2016 documentary "Do Not Resist" at the Virginia Historical Society. Not sure how crowded it would be, I arrived a mite early (but with reading material) to score a decent seat.
My mistake was taking one in front of a self-involved woman who couldn't shut up. After explaining to anyone who would listen that she'd have to move when her daughter left for college so that she wasn't more than 2 hours from her side in case of emergency, she moved on to giving her hapless daughter tips for college life.
At least until her daughter couldn't take it anymore.
Daughter (in a disgusted voice): Face it, Mom, you want to go to college for me.
Mom (tossing hair): Yes, I do.
Thankfully, the film was about to be introduced, so someone shushed them. We were told that the Tribeca Film Festival had awarded the film best documentary winner and 72 minutes later when it ended, it was pretty clear why.
First off, filmmaker Craig Atkinson had obtained stellar access to film whatever he wanted for the most part, going along on raids with SWAT teams and being on the street during protests and police confrontations. And lest we get the impression that these raids are on an as-needed basis, the film explains that in 1980 there were 3,000 Swat busts and now we average 50-80,000 a year. A year.
Why has the American public been so unaware that since September 11th, the department of Homeland Security has been issuing military equipment - heavily armored trucks, bayonets, for crying out loud - to any Tom, Dick or Harry small town that wants them?
One town had a single law enforcement officer yet had requested two armored trucks. What kind of crazy is this?
As one woman on the street in Ferguson says, "They need to stop giving these boys these toys because they don't know how to handle them." Shout it to the heavens, honey.
That may be because every FBI agent and a lot of local cops are schooled by the same motivational whacko, Dave Grossman, who instructs them - "What do you fight violence with? Superior violence!" - to think of themselves as the frontline and the people in the streets as the enemy. A man who talks about "righteous violence."
A man who has helped militarize police training.
Even former FBI director James Comey puts in an appearance, trying to justify militarizing the cops but his argument doesn't hold much water.
A professor explains that with increasing technology, we'll soon be able to discover while a baby is in utero if it's more than 50% likely to grow up to commit a homicide. "What do you do with that information?" he asks rhetorically. "What does the mother do?"
Watching SWAT team members suit up,and drive over (in one case, with no clear idea where their target was, but they intended to Google map it on the way) to bust a house was disquieting, but seeming them forcefully break windows as a diversionary technique (for which they don't reimburse the homeowner) and storm doors was downright disturbing.
One agent even admits that busts are a 50/50 chance, so half the time they've swooped in on the wrong people. Their attitude? Oh, well.
In one case in the film where they were wrong and it wasn't a drug house, they steal nearly $900 of the suspect's savings after handcuffing him. Then when all they find is a tiny bud of weed in the kid's backpack, they decide to go back in the house for a further "search."
The head agent tells the filmmaker to stop filming at that point. Apparently he didn't want caught on camera their staging of the scene. Um, what country is this again?
During the Q & A afterward, it seemed clear that some people are reluctant to admit that we're currently a country transitioning to martial law without so much as acknowledging it's become the new normal.
"Do Not Resist" should be required resistance viewing. What is it that bumper sticker says, if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention?
Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore...
Showing posts with label Created Equal Film Series. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Created Equal Film Series. Show all posts
Thursday, September 7, 2017
Friday, September 2, 2016
Doing the Right Thing
There is no pleasure for me in turning the calendar to September.
Oh, I did it today, rearranging my perpetual calendar to reflect the change, but it's pulling out the four-month block - September, October, November, December - knowing that that's what I have to look forward to that signals the beginning of the end for summer fans like me.
And just as the month changes, so does the tone of local culture. We're more serious, more earnest, it seems, immediately.
I don't have to look any further than the opening of "Stump," the new photography show at Candela Gallery, for proof. I recently mentioned to a friend that never in all my years as a registered voter have I felt as appalled as at this election cycle.
Apparently on the exact same page as me is Candela Gallery's owner, who deals with it creatively by mounting a show of work addressing big issues, the scarred political landscape and what a general mess we now have on our hands.
Women's concerns, the Black Lives Matter Movement, the Presidential election, consumerism, Guantanamo Bay, immigration, environmentalism, it's all laid out in an array of photographic processes for Richmond to consider.
Best of all, they also have voter registration (and changes to your status) going on every single day the gallery is open. It's a brilliant way of starting a dialog and engaging the community in a bigger conversation after being motivated by the artistic reminders on the wall of all that still needs addressing.
It is most definitely not a show you'd see during the lazy days of a goof-off summer. Nope, it's serious September all right.
The same could be said for the Virginia Historical Society's Created Equal Film series, which started tonight with a crowd that pulled from their noontime Banner lectures as well as attracting those specifically interested in the film "Rosenwald" about the Jewish Sears & Roebuck exec who'd established challenge grants to build 5,000 schools for black children across the south (you know, just a little hobby of a white man during the Jim Crow era).
That diversity meant there were maxi dresses, hearing aids, hippie types, grand dames and everyone in between. So much to see and eavesdrop on.
Sit anywhere. This is one place where anywhere you sit, the sound is great.
I can't help but notice a woman in her thirties passing the time reading a magazine, not a device.
Susan! How's retirement treating you?
A 20-something reads a hardback book, at least until her man arrives and then they both take out phones and address their attention to the outer world, not each other.
Do you have a good sight line?
Doesn't matter. Cataracts.
Are you any closer to addressing that?
I have to wait for Charlie to get better first.
Amazingly, the auditorium is filling completely up for a documentary about a rich Jewish man who gave away his fortune in the form of building YMCAs and schools for blacks, and then issuing grants and fellowships.
She's so busy with herself, she probably didn't even notice her husband wasn't there. That's my catty comment for the night.
The seats next to me were taken by a couple of history buffs who'd driven down from Stafford because of the subject matter.
Talking about race, his wife nudged him to share some of his memories, things like not being able to try on clothes at J.C. Penney, or always having to sit upstairs at movie theaters and not being allowed to eat at lunch counters.
She recalled being shocked at the difference in how history was taught when she moved from Ohio to Virginia in 1968. "In Ohio, the history books said the Civil War ended, but here..." she shrugged.
Let's just say it was the kind of audience who got excited and started murmuring when it was announced that at the next film in the series, Mary Sue Terry would be speaking.
Actually, when the speaker said that the Rosenwald schools were still in use all the way up until the Brown decision in 1960, many of them were just as vocal and a chorus of knowing "mmm-hmms" ran through the room.
My meager knowledge of Julius Rosenwald came from a book talk in this very same room a few years back, so about all I was sure of was that he'd been a terrific businessman and an early Civil Rights activist.
What came across loud and clear in the film was how much his Jewish faith shaped how he used his Sears fortune for good, mainly due to the Jewish commitment to philanthropy and charity as well as his fascination with Booker T. Washington's "Up from Slavery" and his revulsion over the pogroms going on in Russia at the time.
Early on in his success, his goal was to have $15,000: $5K to save, $5K to spend and $5K to give away. But he didn't just hand over cash; instead he expected the black community to come up with a third of the cost of a school, the white populace another third and he'd do the final third.
Fair is fair.
Needless to say, the communities raised the money and helped build the modern, light-filled schools, always built to be south-facing with high windows, probably familiar to the dozens of Rosenwald Schools graduates in the room tonight
Since most of the audience was of an age, they got a big laugh out of the film explaining the cultural significance of the Sears catalog with its endless, exotic and myriad choices.
"It was like what Amazon is today," some obviously millennial writer had penned. Thanks for the clarification, kid.
We learned that the Sears catalog was made specifically to be smaller than the Montgomery Ward catalog so it would always rest on top in a stack. How's that for marketing genius?
One woman summed up her allegiance to the catalog by saying, "You wished on it, then you could recycle it." Um, sure could.
But it was even more than YMCAs, schools and grants, though everyone from the "busboy poet" Langston Hughes to Ralph Ellison to James Baldwin to Gordon Parks benefited from those grants.
He'd also built an enormous apartment complex in Chicago, the Michigan Boulevard Garden Building so middle class blacks had a safe and handsome place to raise a family. People in the film spoke glowingly of the "village" that covered an entire city block, offering stores, apartments and a huge enclosed garden where children spent entire days and summers safely.
The film made a case for Rosenwald's philanthropy being based on a shared sense with blacks of being part of a "despised race." Someone called him a man of righteous action, a label I think he'd have been fine with.
No man of righteous action would be able to accept our current state of racial progress, meaning if old Julius were still here, he'd be trying to do something about it. Seriously.
Especially now that it's September.
Oh, I did it today, rearranging my perpetual calendar to reflect the change, but it's pulling out the four-month block - September, October, November, December - knowing that that's what I have to look forward to that signals the beginning of the end for summer fans like me.
And just as the month changes, so does the tone of local culture. We're more serious, more earnest, it seems, immediately.
I don't have to look any further than the opening of "Stump," the new photography show at Candela Gallery, for proof. I recently mentioned to a friend that never in all my years as a registered voter have I felt as appalled as at this election cycle.
Apparently on the exact same page as me is Candela Gallery's owner, who deals with it creatively by mounting a show of work addressing big issues, the scarred political landscape and what a general mess we now have on our hands.
Women's concerns, the Black Lives Matter Movement, the Presidential election, consumerism, Guantanamo Bay, immigration, environmentalism, it's all laid out in an array of photographic processes for Richmond to consider.
Best of all, they also have voter registration (and changes to your status) going on every single day the gallery is open. It's a brilliant way of starting a dialog and engaging the community in a bigger conversation after being motivated by the artistic reminders on the wall of all that still needs addressing.
It is most definitely not a show you'd see during the lazy days of a goof-off summer. Nope, it's serious September all right.
The same could be said for the Virginia Historical Society's Created Equal Film series, which started tonight with a crowd that pulled from their noontime Banner lectures as well as attracting those specifically interested in the film "Rosenwald" about the Jewish Sears & Roebuck exec who'd established challenge grants to build 5,000 schools for black children across the south (you know, just a little hobby of a white man during the Jim Crow era).
That diversity meant there were maxi dresses, hearing aids, hippie types, grand dames and everyone in between. So much to see and eavesdrop on.
Sit anywhere. This is one place where anywhere you sit, the sound is great.
I can't help but notice a woman in her thirties passing the time reading a magazine, not a device.
Susan! How's retirement treating you?
A 20-something reads a hardback book, at least until her man arrives and then they both take out phones and address their attention to the outer world, not each other.
Do you have a good sight line?
Doesn't matter. Cataracts.
Are you any closer to addressing that?
I have to wait for Charlie to get better first.
Amazingly, the auditorium is filling completely up for a documentary about a rich Jewish man who gave away his fortune in the form of building YMCAs and schools for blacks, and then issuing grants and fellowships.
She's so busy with herself, she probably didn't even notice her husband wasn't there. That's my catty comment for the night.
The seats next to me were taken by a couple of history buffs who'd driven down from Stafford because of the subject matter.
Talking about race, his wife nudged him to share some of his memories, things like not being able to try on clothes at J.C. Penney, or always having to sit upstairs at movie theaters and not being allowed to eat at lunch counters.
She recalled being shocked at the difference in how history was taught when she moved from Ohio to Virginia in 1968. "In Ohio, the history books said the Civil War ended, but here..." she shrugged.
Let's just say it was the kind of audience who got excited and started murmuring when it was announced that at the next film in the series, Mary Sue Terry would be speaking.
Actually, when the speaker said that the Rosenwald schools were still in use all the way up until the Brown decision in 1960, many of them were just as vocal and a chorus of knowing "mmm-hmms" ran through the room.
My meager knowledge of Julius Rosenwald came from a book talk in this very same room a few years back, so about all I was sure of was that he'd been a terrific businessman and an early Civil Rights activist.
What came across loud and clear in the film was how much his Jewish faith shaped how he used his Sears fortune for good, mainly due to the Jewish commitment to philanthropy and charity as well as his fascination with Booker T. Washington's "Up from Slavery" and his revulsion over the pogroms going on in Russia at the time.
Early on in his success, his goal was to have $15,000: $5K to save, $5K to spend and $5K to give away. But he didn't just hand over cash; instead he expected the black community to come up with a third of the cost of a school, the white populace another third and he'd do the final third.
Fair is fair.
Needless to say, the communities raised the money and helped build the modern, light-filled schools, always built to be south-facing with high windows, probably familiar to the dozens of Rosenwald Schools graduates in the room tonight
Since most of the audience was of an age, they got a big laugh out of the film explaining the cultural significance of the Sears catalog with its endless, exotic and myriad choices.
"It was like what Amazon is today," some obviously millennial writer had penned. Thanks for the clarification, kid.
We learned that the Sears catalog was made specifically to be smaller than the Montgomery Ward catalog so it would always rest on top in a stack. How's that for marketing genius?
One woman summed up her allegiance to the catalog by saying, "You wished on it, then you could recycle it." Um, sure could.
But it was even more than YMCAs, schools and grants, though everyone from the "busboy poet" Langston Hughes to Ralph Ellison to James Baldwin to Gordon Parks benefited from those grants.
He'd also built an enormous apartment complex in Chicago, the Michigan Boulevard Garden Building so middle class blacks had a safe and handsome place to raise a family. People in the film spoke glowingly of the "village" that covered an entire city block, offering stores, apartments and a huge enclosed garden where children spent entire days and summers safely.
The film made a case for Rosenwald's philanthropy being based on a shared sense with blacks of being part of a "despised race." Someone called him a man of righteous action, a label I think he'd have been fine with.
No man of righteous action would be able to accept our current state of racial progress, meaning if old Julius were still here, he'd be trying to do something about it. Seriously.
Especially now that it's September.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
