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this week i’ve been thinking a lot about ways in which i could help. i can’t do or give as much as some can, but i do have this platform on a site that i dearly love, and i intend on using it for a moment to try and help:
here is a great resource of blm information and places to sign and donate overall to learn more and help. here is a google doc link to many petitions, places to donate, and even numbers and emails. this is a site where you can split donations among up to 60 different bail funds for protesters, other services and centers. this fund helps black trans protesters with resources, medical care and bail. and…
this was an absolute mandatory watch to recognise the systematic racism within the police force, government and the rest of the world.
It is not enough to share a blacked out screen on Instagram or retweet one #blacklivesmatter post on twitter. we need to stand up, use our voices to amplify and to challenge anti-black actions. we need to become allies, acknowledge our privilege and use it to educate others & help poc. DO NOT STAY SILENT.
Undeniably a primer to this issue (not that there's anything wrong with, primers are valuable) but there's also some power to the way Duvernay sequences this, the way she moves us through the major events, records and timelines with passion and anger, allowing black voices and art to naturally narrate, connecting the simple progression of power, policy and victim into the larger, shape-shifting systemic evil we're still allowing to abolish freedoms and immiserate and end the lives today. One of the more compelling aspects is how she goes on to present an implicit case for the inherent distrust that comes with having seen the same institutions (and even the same faces!) redesign and repeat the same horrors again and again for over a century.
Not a bad film, exactly—just one that I didn't need to watch, telling me a whole lot of things that I already know. First half hour in particular laboriously outlines 20th-century racial politics, assuming ignorance of such basics as The Birth of a Nation, Jim Crow laws, and the Southern strategy; I felt like I'd accidentally wandered into an 8th-grade history class, started wondering if maybe there were some papers I could correct. Eventually, DuVernay starts making a cogent, vital argument, viz. the tactical imprisonment of African-Americans as an extension of slavery, but in a way that still seems to be pitched at extremely low-information viewers. I was more or less familiar with the substance of O.J.: Made in…
THIS is what they should be showing you in US history in high school. Watch this. Then tell everyone you know to watch this.
“People say all the time, ‘well, I don’t understand how people could have tolerated slavery?’ ‘How could they have made peace with that?’ ‘How could people have gone to a lynching and participated in that?’ ‘That’s so crazy, if I was living at that time I would never have tolerated anything like that.’ And the truth is we are living in this time, and we are tolerating it.”
It starts off loud yet the energy never settles. Its main focus may sometimes get off track, but for a documentary that covers so much history relative to its runtime this structure works pretty well. It’s definitely worth watching, even if you think you already know everything.
This excellent documentary by director Ava DuVernay takes its name from the 13th amendment to the United States Constitution, which (purportedly) abolished slavery before proficiently displaying the fact that oppression has survived simply by just transforming, and that it's mostly mentalities and behaviours which require modification on an absolute level. There's an extensive assortment of historical footage which both distresses and inflames which are worked in with the talking head interviews of scholars, present-day politicians, as well as activists in the Black Lives Matter movement.
The roster of the people that DuVernay manages to recruit is impressive. They assist in affirming her assertions very convincingly, and while there are tremendous amounts of horrendous statistics presented, the facts are never delivered…
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