whose streets

Becky took me to see Whose Streets last night, and I highly recommend seeing it if you haven't already. It's a film documenting the events in Ferguson, MO, from the POV of people who were there, people who were on the streets from day one. It's a powerful look at a community struggling to deal with systematic oppression and violence at the hands of police, specifically the death of Michael Brown, which sparked those events. And it's a necessary perspective that counters much of what was presented in the days and weeks that followed Brown's death by the mainstream media and city officials.

It angered and upset me and reminded me of so many other injustices. It also made me feel frustrated, powerless, because it seems as if there's no justice for the state (no indictment of Darren Wilson and so many others who murder unarmed citizens), just as there's no justice for companies like Wells Fargo (who's recently been in the news for defrauding hundreds of thousands of people with barely a slap on the wrist). And in this documentary, the anger and frustration of this grief stricken community is palpable and takes centre stage. An unarmed man is killed. The community demands answers and gets none. They come together to mourn and show their love and support for one another and the police show up with armoured vehicles and riot gear and an absence of any empathy whatsoever, inciting violence by bullying the community with guns and chemical weapons and confining them, in their pain and anger, to a small area ready to explode, and then presenting the narrative, with the help of the media, that the residents of Ferguson are just a bunch of violent, self-destructive animals.

Yes, there was some looting and a building was burnt. But as mindless as the looting and vandalism initially seems to some (mostly white people who haven't had the same experience with systematic violence and racial prejudice as black individuals and communities), one person hit the nail on the head when they said that it's all about proximity. You can't take on huge companies like Wells Fargo just as you can't take on the police or the racism that still exists and causes so much suffering, so you smash and loot whatever is close to you, whatever is in your power to take on and gain some sort of redress from, even if you're ultimately hurting your own community. It's not rational; it's emotional, symbolic. And that's precisely what MLK Jr. meant when he said that the riot is the language of the unheard. Nobody heard these people when they spoke with words and candles and tears, so some of them started speaking with their anger and rage and fists.

But through it all, this community refused to back down or to remain silent, and they continued to document their own experiences and struggles even if no one else (or at least those in power) was listening. And that's what I took away from this film, that we (especially white people) have to start listening and then start acting in solidarity by fighting against racism in all its forms, and seek to demilitarize the police and make them community institutions rather than arms of the state (or abolish them altogether), or else there's going to be another Ferguson, just as there's been numerous Fergusons in the past, Chicago in 1919, Harlem in 1964, Watts in 1965, Detroit in 1967, LA in 1992, Baltimore in 2015, and so many more.

Talking about it with Becky afterwards, I realized that I can't speak for people of colour. I can't say that I know what it's like to be black in the US just because I grew up in Detroit or have black friends. But from listening to them and seeing with my own eyes what's being done to them, I think I at least have an idea of the struggles they have to face and the barriers they have to overcome that I simply don't. And what I can do is try to amplify their message through my words and show solidarity with their struggles through my actions by being vocal, by admitting that racism exists and that its our responsibility to help dismantle it, by arguing against simplistic, patronizing narratives of violent blacks terrorizing their own communities for no reason, and by shining a light on a different narrative, that of people who have to live with this systematic violence every single day of their lives.

The film ends with this passage from the preamble of the Declaration of independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.

Their power, the very foundation of our civil society itself, is unjust without our collective consent; and I think it's way past time that we vocally and vociferously relinquish that consent. Because to remain silent in the face of oppression is to give our implicit consent to the oppressors and to turn our backs on the victims of injustice.