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Continuing our Black History Month series about documentaries, the recently released “Black Power Mixtape, 1967-1975″ is an important film that serves as an introduction to the Black Power movement in the U.S. as seen through the lens of Swedish journalists. This short trailer (1:59) explains a bit more about the film:
Watch Looking Back at the Black Power Movement on PBS. See more from Independent Lens.
The film features archival footage from the period with voiceovers from contemporary artists. While I didn’t find that the voiceovers added much of value to the film, some of the archival footage – particularly the clip of Angela Davis responding to an interviewer’s question about ‘violence’ – is compelling and makes the film worth watching.
The film becomes problematic in the last half when it locates the demise of the Black Power movement on the rise of drugs in the Black community, both of which it seems to suggest is the fault of Black mothers. This is a serious misstep on the part of the filmmakers as it feeds into dominant narratives about Black pathology.
An excellent companion text, and one that offers a much more nuanced analysis of the Black Power movement, is Professor Alondra Nelson’s Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). While the film brackets the Black Power movement off to a bygone historical era, Nelson’s work extends that lens to the present day and demonstrates how that struggle continues, and does so without resorting to tropes of Black pathology, but instead focusing on empowerment within the Black community in the face of ongoing discrimination.
The film is available on most PBS stations on the Independent Lens series (check local listings), and is currently streaming on iTunes and Netflix. Nelson’s book is available from University of Minnesota Press, at the usual online retailers, and of course, independent book stores (good reminder, @Joyce!)
Peter recently noted some Guardian reporting on the urban revolts in England. Let me add a little to that. The Guardian paper in England has reported on an analysis by Liverpool professor Alex Singleton on some 1,297 people who had their first hearing in magistrate courts on charges associated with the people’s revolts in London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool. Most are Londoners.
As any social scientist who has studied such revolts in the U.S. could have told them in advance, most of those who revolted were the young male residents of very impoverished areas. That is exactly what the Singleton/Guardian analysis reports for these urban revolts. Singleton discovered most arrested lived in very poor urban areas, with a high percent in extreme poverty areas:
. . . with 41% of suspects living in one of the top 10% of most deprived places in the country. The data also shows that 66% of neighbourhoods where the accused live got poorer between 2007 and 2010. . . . Only a very small number in our data were aged over 30. More than 90% are male.
Others have noted that people of color engaged in revolts in their areas, and impoverished whites in yet other areas. Most have been charged with theft, having stolen goods, burglary, or violent disorder. Increasing impoverishment and unemployment in an age where people expect a decent standard of living is the stuff out of which such urban revolts is made. The Guardian, to its credit, takes on the centuries-old rationale of the rich and elites in society, who always see “rioters” as criminal or just rioting for “fun and profit,” to quote a conservative U.S. social scientist on the African American revolts of the 1960s and 1970s. They note:
David Cameron [white conservative British prime minister] said this week that the riots “were not about poverty”, but the Guardian’s database of court cases raises the question that there may be, at the very least, a correlation between economic hardship and those accused of taking part in last week’s violence and looting.
Indeed, it does. And it always will be thus for this type of urban revolt. And the white racial framing denying the real reasons for such revolts seems to be age-old, suggesting some problems with theories like that of “racial formation theory” that substantially neglect issues of institutionalized racism and entrenched systemic racism and that tend to accent dramatic changes over time in a Western society’s “racial formations.” At least in whites’ racial framing of events like urban revolts by people of color, changes are much less than such optimistic theories of “race” typically suggest. This is true, too, for many other areas of systemic racism.
