Whose Streets is an unusual documentary about the riots in Ferguson that followed the death of Mike Brown.
I say unusual because the focus on the surface of what was presented by the activists in the film belies many more interesting areas of exploration. More specifically, while there are clearly many zealots for Black Revolutionary Struggle – no one ever talks about the organization that’s been build or what it does besides protest. Other practical things are ignored as well. We see in the beginning that Brittany quits her job to protest for over 57 days, but how she and her girlfriend-turned-wife-and-partner-in-activism manages to sustain herself and her child are never addressed. As this capacity to financially drop the “real world” at the same time she is complaining about the financial difficulties faced ber her community is unusual and – in my view – merits explanation.
Throughout the film queer black communists give interviews to the camera, yet while we learn their resentful views regarding the police, how burning a building is a “strategic act” that is “revolution – we learn nothing about the organization, guiding mission or the other projects and activities that unites them.
Looking at the website of the Organization for Black Struggle, which has existed since 1980, it seems that they are Pan-Africanist Marxists with connections to CAIR that occasionally engage in electoral politics – but not much else.
Since I studied Marxism with Vivek Chibber, Bertell Ollman, and Slavoj Zizek during my Master’s studies at NYU I kept hoping for something substantive to be raised – however it never was. Instead all I heard were avant-guardist platitudes aimed at justifying their illegalist positions and strained relations with the larger community.
Another example of things that made the tone of the film now sit right with me was when one of the Ferguson participants holds up artifacts left in the street by riot police, such as the shells from rubber bullets, he holds up a spent cannister of tear gas and explains how the police’s use of this to dispurse crowds is illegal. He says, with clear animosity in his voice, that these are only supposed to be used in times of war. This is incorrect, and in fact the opposite of what’s true. Tear gas is considered forbidden in war conditions and legal to use on civilians. are doing in the streets is illegal.
That Tef Poe tweeted something to the same effect, considering his close relationship with TeleSUR, qualifies as Orwellian Irony.
To his credit Tef Poe was a good MC for the riots. Hearing him speak in this context was much more enjoyable than when I’ve made the effort to listen to his music. When I heard him say the phrase “this ain’t yo daddy’s civil rights movement” to a large assemblage of people, I couldn’t help but crack up laughing. I remembered that Layla Brown-Vincent described exactly this scene in her thesis We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Pan-African Consciousness Raising and Organizing in the United States and Venezuela , but I never expected to actually see it.
Unrelated to my comments on the film, I just wanted to say that The Boondocks was an incredibly witty and insightful television series and that I didn’t realize that there was also a collected book of newspaper comics by the same person that wrote for the series.
The Frantz Fanon quote and the shot of books is meant to, presumably, depict wokeness – but if you actually pause the film and look at what’s there – it appearent that what’s there is not all that deep. I should know, I’ve read about half of the non-fiction books she shown there.
At the beginning of the “organic protests” following Michael Brown’s death – far left – it’s already appearent that members of the Revolutionary Communist Party‘s Chicago chapter are present. Assata’s Daughter, another revolutionary communist group, frequently appears in the film. Worth mentioning is that the drive time from Chicago to St. Louis is four a half hours and, having reviewed the time lines of other communist activist groups, I know that immediately following the death of Michael Brown other groups from New York and Minneapolis also went there – as well those from other locales. Considering that it’s well documented in the public statements of police officers that the area was swarming with foreign agitators even from the beginning – it’s notable that this fact isn’t included within the film. Instead a number of individual residents are depicted disconnected from riots saying that they live there.
The statements captured on film by Bassem Masri, a Palestinian born St. Louis transplant that those around him characterized as an agressive drug addict and who died of a fentanyl overdose not long after the Ferguson riots, are vastly different in tone from the threatening chants towards the police in the videos he uploaded to YouTube during these events. His characterization of Ferguson as being equivalent to Palestine is, of course, categorically absurd.
I learned through research after watching the film that the name of the organization that Brittany Ferrell founded was Millenial Activists United, which may or may not be an intentional allusion to the Mau Mau.
The scenes wherein she leads a group of protestors to shut down a highway intersections was, well, bizarre.
I clipped the middle image as it’s at the point in which she leads a call and response chant that quotes Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.
The last image, is a screen shot of her arrest report. Brittany Ferrell’s incredulous response to reading aloud the officer’s description of the scene which the viewed of the film has just scene is bizarre. We’ve just seen her do everything that’s been described in the report – and yet she claims that’s not what happened at all.
Unsurprisingly, given Danny Glover’s penchant for support for pan-Africanist and revolutionary activists – there is a picture of him with Brittney on her Twitter.
Given all of the above people’s passionate misunderstandings of law, their intentional and unnecessary provocations toward police, and their projection onto “the system” of issues that were better suited to being addressed by a more productive form of communal, collective action I found it difficuly to be sympathetic to the riots are the voices of the unheard rhetoric which closes the film.
The citation of the section of the Declaration of Independance stating that people have a right to overthrow the government when it oppresses them at the close of the film seemed to me to be ham-fisted and incongruent with what Whose Streets? just presented – unless the point was to highlight the absurdity of narcissistic angry black lesbian communists’ claims that street protests conceptualized as some significant step in a revolutionary process was the answer to their grievances – especially considering many of them depicted in the film seemed so trivial.
Lastly, gotta admit that it wasn’t a big surprise given that Pan-Africanist Revolutionaries were the protagonist of the film when I saw that Nicholas Maduro’s favorite interruptionist organization – Code Pink helped fund this film. I wonder how many other Venezuelan connected/sponsored organizations were there at Ferguson…