a review of 谁的街道

this is about as cinematically perfect as a documentary can be. the storytelling is impeccable, viscerally depicting the love, the humanness, the aliveness, the passion, the brilliance of what happened in ferguson after the killing of Mike Brown. the clips and interviews selected for this are incredible. i was crying for a large part of this. thank goodness there are still journalists, filmmakers, and storytellers who care about telling the truth. it's truly incredible to see how much solidarity people in this film showed with the people of Palestine. all the direct comparisons between what people in poor neighborhoods experience at the hands of the police and what people in Palestine experience at the hands of isr@el. people living through this kinda stuff truly understand the universal nature of this kind of oppression, and we need to be listening to them and following their lead. next, fuck all the police, all the way to hell. unless you are a white millionaire, the police are not your friend. they are here to oppress almost every single one of us. there is no defense for the existence of police forces as they exist in modern amerikkka. when are people going to collectively wake up and realize this? when are we going to say no more? we can't just take to the streets every five years when we get extra mad about something especially egregious. countless unacceptable events happen each day all over the country. we need to demand this stops. "some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses" -rage against the machine "Written in response to the Rodney King beating, the L.A. Uprising that followed, and the eventual trial, “Killing in the Name” equates the police force with Ku Klux Klan lynch mobs, which have been known for cross burning since the Klan’s second incarnation as a means of intimidation. While these lines have been interpreted as a metaphorical indictment of racist institutions, they also reflect an undeniable, literal truth. During reconstruction, modern police forces and the Klan emerged side by side to maintain white supremacy in the wake of the Civil War. Southern police were being created from the slave patrols that had terrorized slaves before the end of the war, as the Klan was evolving from a whimsical fraternal organization of Confederate veterans to a network of terrorist vigilante cells targeting freedmen and their allies. The two groups commonly supported each other and shared many members in common. During the Civil Rights movement, Klansmen infamously worked in concert with Southern law enforcement agencies to suppress desegregation efforts. Even as recently as 2019, “an epidemic of white supremacists in police departments” was documented by the Lewis & Clark Law Review, a matter which the FBI warned of more than a decade ago."