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9500 Liberty: Immigration Battle in Prince William County
Posted by: | CommentsA new documentary, “9500 Liberty,” offers a revealing look at the battle over immigration in the U.S. through the lens of one place, Prince William County, Virginia. The film has already won several film festival awards, and this is a trailer for the film (4:23) which gives you a sense of it:
Filmmakers Annabel Park and Eric Byler describe the film this way:
9500 Liberty reveals the startling vulnerability of a local government, targeted by national anti-immigration networks using the Internet to frighten and intimidate lawmakers and citizens. Alarmed by a climate of fear and racial division, residents form a resistance using YouTube videos and virtual townhalls, setting up a real-life showdown in the seat of county government. The devastating social and economic impact of the “Immigration Resolution” is felt in the lives of real people in homes and in local businesses. But the ferocious fight to adopt and then reverse this policy unfolds inside government chambers, on the streets, and on the Internet. 9500 Liberty provides a front row seat to all three battlegrounds.
You can find upcoming screenings and theatrical releases here.
Programming Alert: “Disturbing the Universe” on PBS
Posted by: | CommentsBack in December, I noted the new documentary “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe.” about the famous (or, infamous) civil rights lawyer. Now, the film is airing on PBS in most areas of the U.S. on Tuesday (6/22/10). I’m glad to see this film getting a wider audience through its distribution on PBS because I think that it’s a good introduction to thinking about race and institutional racism more critically.
Woven into the narrative about Kunstler’s life and transformation into a civil rights rabblerouser, the film tells a number of other stories. The film provides a compelling history of the uprising at Attica, where Kunstler negotiated on behalf of the (predominantly black) prisoners. And, the film also chronicles Kunstler’s involvement in the seige at Wounded Knee where he served as a negotiator for Native Americans in AIM who were staging a protest there, demanding that the U.S. Government honor centuries of broken treaties. Kunstler was able to help avoid a massacre there and successfully defended Russell Banks and Dennis Banks, two of the leaders of the protest, at their subsequent trial in federal court. Later, Kunstler defends Yusef Salaam, one of the so-called “Central Park Joggers,” who was exonerated, after being incarcerated for many years.
The filmmakers are Kunstler’s two daughters – Sarah Kunstler and Emily Kunstler – and they do a good job of providing a thoughtful portrait of their father as a passionate but flawed man. Their film also offers a much needed reminder of what it looks like to do battle against institutionalized racism.
To find the film on your tv-machine, check your local PBS listing and set the DVR.
William Kunstler and the Active Voice to Discuss Racism
Posted by: | CommentsI saw a new documentary called “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe,” about the civil rights lawyer. the film was made by his two daughters from his second marriage, Sarah and Emily Kunstler. it was interesting and much of the film was about racism, although none of the promotional materials hint at this. In this way, it’s much like the documentary “The Weather Underground,” which also focuses a good deal on racism.
One of the things that struck me most profoundly about the Kunstler film was the way that the language about institutional racism in the late 1960s early 1970s is so strikingly different from the way we talk about race and racism today. What I mean about the language around institutional racism is that Kunstler would say things like, “the white power structure” or “the racist court system” and “all whites are racist” and “we (whites) are responsible for letting this racist power structure continue.”
This language and way of talking about racism is all in the category of “stuff you just don’t hear anymore.”
The power of calling out the white power structure and the way that individual whites participate in this racism was clearest for me in the film when they were exploring the issue of the uprising at Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Kunstler got called in as a negotiator for the prisoners. This attempt failed and dozens of people – both inmates and guards – were killed by the state who went in and shot them. after the uprising was put down, there’s this amazing archival footage of one of the white soldiers (national guard?) who went in to the prison, and he’s got his fist in the air, pumping it victoriously and he says, “Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about…. white power!” it’s just a chilling moment that also perfectly illustrates what Kunstler’s been saying throughout the film.
Following soon after that, Kunstler went to the seige at Wounded Knee to serve as a negotiator for Native Americans in AIM who were staging a protest there, demanding that the U.S. Government honor centuries of broken treaties. Kunstler was able to help avoid a massacre there and successfully defended Russell Banks and Dennis Banks, two of the leaders of the protest, at their subsequent trial in federal court.
Kunstler’s daughters (the filmmakers) were thoughtful about racism and their father’s struggle against it. I especially liked when they went back and tried to find out how their dad began to be conscious about racism. They included a brief section in the film that addressed this issue, noting that Kunstler’s race consciousness certainly didn’t come from his parents, who had black servants that used separate toilets and ate apart from the family in the kitchen. This is illustrated by home-movie footage of one of the nameless-black-servants in the family serving the grandmother and one of the filmmakers when she was a child.
The filmmakers were less thoughtful, in my view, in exploring their own racism around their objection to their father’s defending Yusef Salaam, one of the alleged “Central Park jogger rapists.” Years later, of course, Salaam’s conviction was overturned, and thus Kunstler’s defense of him was vindicated, but I wish the filmmakers had done more with this.
Returning to my point about the language around racism, the way the film is advertised and promoted and discussed (i heard a long interview with the filmmakers in which they never mentioned racism even once) is more typical of the way racism gets addressed today, which is in this oblique, passive-voice kind of way.
Today, to the extent that experts and non-experts even acknowledge racism, they may refer to “structural racism” or (in the world of public health where I work) “racial disparites.” But these all happen in the passive voice. Racial disparities just “happen.” There are no actors in today’s language of racial inequality. In Kunstler’s heydey (the civil rights era), there were clearly people who were responsible for the oppression of people of color, and it was white people acting in the interest of a white power structure. Losing that language, we’ve lost some clarity about what is at the root of racial inequality. Today, it seems, no one’s responsible as we live in this ‘racism without racists’ post-civil rights era.
Briefly Noted: Updated Documentary List
Posted by: | CommentsWhile classes are already underway for some folks, like Bridget, classes start again for me on Monday. So, I wanted to briefly note that I’ve updated our “videos” page and added some new documentaries to the list.
The list includes documentaries that are useful for teaching and learning about race and racism. Looking over the list, it seems heavily skewed toward a black-white dichotomy. I’d love to include more films about race and racism beyond this false dichotomy. I’m particularly interested in documentaries about Asians and Asian Americans, Latinos, and the experiences of biracial and multi-racial folks that explicitly deal with issues of race and racism. If you’ve created such a film, or just know of one, you’d like to suggest, please drop me a note. Also, if you’ve bookmarked this page someplace, please update it as I’ve changed the URL.
Documentaries About Race & Racism (*Programming Alert)
Posted by: | CommentsBack in April, Joe wrote about the major new book, Inheriting the Trade by Thomas Norman DeWolf, about a slave-trading family of “The Deep North.” Tonight, the related documentary, “Traces of the Trade,” by Katrina Browne airs on PBS (check your local listings). And, while I’m not great at predicting future trends, I think we will increasingly see non-fiction books combined with documentary films geared for (near) simultaneous release. Mark my words, this is a trend in search of a name, and it has implications for those of us in the classroom as well.
And, I stumbled upon another documentary called “Resolved,” (currently available on HBO in demand). It’s a documentary about high school debaters, predominantly white, and one debate team from a predominantly black school. It’s deeply engrossing – and not just because I did speech and debate in high school. I was unexpectedly blown away by this film, especially the Freire-ian-turn it takes. I highly recommend this film.
Finally, a brief thanks to Melissa F. Weiner, Assistant Professor at Quinnipiac University, for her suggestions for additional video titles. I’ve updated the video page with her suggestions.
Addendum from Joe: I just finished reading the very personal book by Tom DeWolf, Inheriting the Trade, and it is indeed dynamite. You learn not only about the central role of New Englanders in the slave trade, but also about the way in which some members of a large and extended white family learned about their heavy slavery history and tried to come to grips with it, including travels to slave regions of the US and to Africa. I highly recommend the book to you and for class use from high school to graduate school. It will likely change, a little or a lot, all who read it seriously.
