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Stephaniesepiphanies is on blogacation and will return in October. See you then. Thanks for stopping by.
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Sunday, September 24, 2017
Wednesday, September 6, 2017
Whose Streets?
Whose
Streets?
An ad for a
movie about the protests in Ferguson kept popping up in my feed. So, I clicked
on it and found out that there was a documentary on the social unrest in
Ferguson following the killing of Michael Brown. The documentary, Whose Streets?, was playing at a theater
near me.
Image courtesy of Google |
Whose Streets? Did what Detroit did not. Whose
Streets? put a face on the struggle for basic human rights in this country.
While Detroit was a docudrama set in the 60s around the
events at the Algiers Motel, Whose
Streets? Is set in the present day. Both provide an unflinching look at
police brutality and we see that not much—if anything—has changed over the last
50 years.
Detroit’s brutalization of Black bodies is void
of humanity. We see them beaten and killed. There is no justice for the
families. The end. Detroit focuses on
the victims. They are nothing more than
bruised and battered bodies some of which are discarded with the ease of
throwing out the trash. They don’t exist outside of the hotel.
Whose Streets? Is told from the perspective of the
protesters. We not only get to see them taking to the streets, we also get to
go behind the scenes. We are invited into their homes. We see them having
breakfast, talking about homework. We see them as people fighting for justice
while still living day to day.
Detroit is
about helplessness in the face of tragedy; Whose Streets? Is about hope. I’ll
take hope over helplessness any day.