Banished

Note: This was written last week, so some of it might be dated.

In the years between the Civil War and the Great Depression, thousands of blacks were driven out of their homes by their white neighbors and many of these communities, to this day, remain exclusively white. The movie Banished, a documentary by filmmaker Marco Williams, recounts these events and follows the struggles of three black families in their attempts to receive some sort of justice from the towns that have prospered from their kin’s suffering.

This film is a stunning, emotional rollercoaster ride that will leave you frustrated, and angry. Every one should see this.

While there is some hope (many of the people who have brought these injustices to light were white) there is also overwhelming evidence that many of the strides we thought we have made in America were really fantasies. Harrison, Arkansas, a town where blacks were banished literally in a hail of bullets, is a current Klan strong hold, remains exclusively white, but is considered “one of the best places to live in America”. An elderly white man there, one of the hundreds who have decided to retire to Harrison, explains that he moved there because, “one, the price of living here is low and…two, there’s no niggers.” Yet at the same time the more liberal whites, who are attempting to change their town’s image, are clueless as to why blacks are scared to walk their streets. In one of the most intense moments of the film, one of the members of their “racial task force” (the group whites organized to make the town more inclusive) explains to them that the Klan isn’t the town’s problem; the problem is that “you make the Klan welcome here.” Silence fills the room.

The end of the film is a study in futility. As the black families try to find a least a recognition of the crimes committed against them, the city governments try every method to deny that the crimes occurred. There’s the legal method: Show us the deed to the land, they say, but who thought to grab deeds when the side of their homes were on fire, and bullets were streaming through their windows. There’s the “it wasn’t us” method: We weren’t born then, they say. Why should they be held responsible? And when all recourse fails then there’s the method of violence: The Klan shows up, rednecks carrying Confederate flags in one hand, bottles and two-by-fours in the other. The last shot of the film is a picture of the Washington monument and the message that of the thousands of blacks banished from their homes only four have received reparations, those four are all from one town: Rosewood, Florida.

So coming out of the movie I was really tempted to get into my fuck white people mode. But I quickly realized that that shit is too simple. Banishments to some extent have been going on everywhere on this planet, and it’s not ancient history. The Armenian genocide by the Turks, in 1915 kicked out and killed somewhere between 650,000 to 1.5 million Armenians. Turkey claims it never happened. There was the Bosnian genocide and displacement by the Serbs in 1992 that claimed almost 2 million people. The International Court of Justice in 2006 found Serbia not culpable. And then there’s Rwanda, Dafur.
And what about us? In 2003 the United States, based on fraudulent evidence, misinformation and lies, invaded Iraq. At a cost to us of over 400 billion dollars we now have almost 4,000 US troops and tens of thousands of Iraqi dead, their infrastructure collapsed, and a sectarian civil war that threatens to pop the Middle East like a zit. Will a filmmaker, some hundred years from now, document about how some Iraqi family is suing the US, because their home was bombed and now the US embassy, Halliburton facility, or Starbucks is built in its place?

Now I’m not going to make any friends with this next part, but screw it, I’m going to speak my mind.

And while all this shit, this perpetuation of the cycle of suffering and greed continues, I see Dip Set…Dip Setting, 50 rapping about window shopping while he’s slurping milkshakes with Mace, Pac-Man Jones is making it rain at clubs, Beyonce is still dancing in that ‘Get me Bodied’ video, and NYCKZ is still stylin on ‘em. Yeah, I’m pointing to some particular faces, but the actions of a few are endemic of the entire community of Hip-Hop, the majority of black superstars, and maybe black’s entire mindset. I spoke in my previous column about the lack of black vision, and yes there are pragmatic things we have to face such as education, health care, and the inequity of the prison system. But along with that comes a certain moral obligation to confront the specters of our past in a way that will not allow them to continue. I’m reminded of Chris Rock in Never Scared when he talks about America’s mentality after 9/11:

“At first it was fuck those Arabs, fuck those Arabs, and I was like ok. Then it was fuck those foreigners, fuck those foreigners, and I was like ok. And then it was fuck the Mexicans, fuck the Mexicans, and I was like, hold up, we knows what comes after that—the Jews and the blacks—that train is never late!”

When blacks allow these types of actions by the state to go ignored and unconfronted eventually it will come back on us. How much moral leverage can we possibly have in regards to our plights when we show such disregard to others who are either in the same situation or getting in that same situation, in the name of America? Or to make it even more basic, why should they care if we don’t? How can we ever get America to address the issues of wealth disparity in our community, when we prosper off of the oppression of others?

Look, I’m not Bill Cosby, and I’m sure as shit not going to put the responsibility of all this crap on the shoulders of the people most burdened and crippled by the oppressive policies of this country. But I am saying that we do have to shoulder some of the responsibility. We gotta get in the game. It’s the fourth quarter, ten seconds left, we’re on the five-yard line, and Michael Vick is running a dog fight in the basement of his mansion. We’ve grown up, we’ve gone to college and become global. If we hope to succeed in our quest for justice then we’ve got to choose a side. We have to step up or sit down. But be forewarned, usually the ones that are sitting down, are the first to get run over.