Get rid of ALL of it. Yeah, ALL of it.

Shit is going to get worse before it gets better. And that’s actually a good thing. See, as a whole, Americans have romanticized our history. We like to think of ourselves as a nation that was formed in opposition to oppression. That our forefathers dreamed a dream of freedom and prosperity for all. That those first settlers banded together out of moral outrage.

Hogwash.

When settlers arrived, the land wasn’t “discovered”. It was stolen. There were already “Indians” living on the land. We stole it from them, slaughtered the tribes… many of which have been completely decimated. We brought disease and death to the indigenous people already here, and called it “settling unknown territory”.

We sent ships to Africa to capture, kidnap and steal African men and women, followed by their transportation under inhumane conditions to a land where they were auctioned, bought, sold, beaten, raped, and tortured, as if they were animals. On their backs, with their blood and sweat and tears and lives, “we” built this country.

We celebrate George Washington’s and Abraham Lincoln’s birthdays as national holidays. We have etched the faces of these two men, along with Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson into the side of a mountain as a homage to their greatness. The faces of past leaders are on our currency, and more so than perhaps any other nation, money is king in this country.

George Washington was a slave owner. Many of neighbors found him to be one of the harshest slave owners in all of Virginia. It wasn’t until the Revolutionary War, when his life was on the line, that his views on slavery changed and he developed a belief/support for abolition. Thomas Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves. His “relationship” with Sally Hemings is now public knowledge, and it is romanticized as one of the first “forbidden loves”. But please. Sally did not have any rights or choice as to her involvement in that union. Abraham Lincoln is touted as this heroic figure in American history but the truth is that he was not an abolitionist and did not believe that Black people should have the same rights as Whites. He’s credited for a lot of ideals and actions that he has no right to receive credit for. And Theodore Roosevelt? He was, himself, a White supremacist.

That’s not to say that there are/were no redeeming qualities in these men, nor that they don’t play a significant role in the history of this country. But it spotlights the dilemma that we continue to dance around but never actually address.

If the statues and other commemorations of Confederate leaders are removed, to be perfectly honest, no one with any moral character is going to care. The removal does NOT remove them from our history. As was brilliantly illustrated in a meme I saw on Facebook, Germany doesn’t have any statues or commemorations to Hitler. It doesn’t erase him from their history. This isn’t hard. Seems like common sense, right?

But it’s actually not that simple. If the monuments to the Confederacy are removed, as they should be, it does open up the door to the examination of all of our monuments to our historical leaders. Why is a statue of Robert E. Lee any more or less offensive than monuments and statues dedicated to Washington or Jefferson or Roosevelt? I mean, with respect to slavery, Lincoln will probably always get a pass because he was the POTUS who “freed” the slaves. But the point is that given how this nation was actually created, how do we justify the continued homage to people who were every bit as racist as the Confederates?

And that, my friends, is the problem. We have to finally put our collective big-girl and big-boy underpants on and examine our real history. Not the version that we’ve allowed to be written into history books and cling to like our lives depend on it. The real story… the good, the bad and the ugly. We’re going to need to throw away all those lies we’ve been teaching and lay all of our shit bare.

There’s actually a lot of “stuff” out there regarding this issue. The thing I don’t get… well, to be fair I don’t want to get…is why this is an argument for KEEPING the Confederate shit, instead of it being used as a starting point for the hard conversations that are literally hundreds of years overdue.

Detroit

Since its limited release, the movie Detroit, directed by white female Kathryn Bigelow, has received mixed reviews. The critics love it; viewers (Black viewers) mostly don’t. Not that it’s badly made, I don’t think. But there is, as there always is when “Black stories” are told from a white lens, some backlash. The amount of violence, the brutality which the Black characters are treated, understandably causes some anxiety. I have read several accounts written by Black men and women, who were moved to tears or had to leave the theater midway through the movie or who felt assaulted themselves as a result of staying through the movie. And I understand it. As a white female, the movie was tough for me to watch. And I don’t have the generations of mistreatment (to put it mildly) nor personal experiences that I have to struggle with. So I get the backlash.

My intention here is not to criticize those who feel this story should not be told from a white lens. My intention here is to ask some questions and make some observations with respect as I do not want to hurt or offend anyone.

The first thing that I noticed in the film was that the background leading to the riots felt, IMO, very glossed over. There were images with a little text that tried to set the stage, but it felt entirely too little, too generalized and too incomplete. I have to wonder if the “white lens” is part of the problem here. Showing harsh images and explaining that predominantly Black neighborhoods were policed by aggressive white officers and it created tension seems a tad underwhelming. Also: the opening scene where there was a police bust of an after-hours club seemed to be the fuse that lit the riots, but that whole scene to me was confusing.

Be that as it may, I thought there were areas of the story that were not well-told. The Black security guard (Melvin Dismukes) introduced himself to some of the National Guard, yet when all hell broke loose and he showed up at the Algiers, the cops didn’t blink. Here’s a Black man with weapons and they don’t even give him a second look? No suspicion?

In addition, afterwards, when Julie identified the officers who beat her and killed her friends, she included Dismukes in the identification… even though it was he and one of the National Guards who got her out of the hotel. What the hell was THAT? No explanation. No recant. Nothing. Maybe that’s how it really went down, but she was beyond angry at what was happening and I don’t see her falsely accusing Dismukes. Not to say that she wasn’t just mistaken from the trauma of the experience but it was never addressed.

To be perfectly honest, how and why Dismukes was even lumped in with the police who actually beat, tortured and murdered those kids is beyond me. He never raised a finger, and in fact made every effort to try to de-escalate.

The one thing that ran through my mind throughout the movie was “nothing’s changed”. Meaning here we had a group of police officers who shot and killed a looter as he ran away from them, despite a “no shoot” order. When confronted, the officer lied about it and went right back into a highly antagonized scene. We saw him shoot another Black man in the back, then drop a knife so that he could claim that he feared for his life, and it was a justified shooting. It wasn’t. We see that shit today.

We see officers on trial for their murderous behavior, and yet it’s the Black men that they beat and tortured who were basically put on trial. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t been doing anything criminal… did you ever get arrested? How many times? How many nights in jail did you spend?

Acquittals on all charges… of course. Isn’t that what we see every time?

This shit is STILL happening.

One of the biggest criticisms I hear is the brutality that is portrayed. And brutality is putting it mildly. And here’s where I get a little confused. If this had been a Spike Lee or John Singleton or Ava Du Vernay film, would there be the same reaction? Many times, when a “Black story” is told from a white lens, the criticism is that the reality of the situation is softened. That the white director eases up on certain things to make it more palatable to white audiences. That’s not the case here.

I didn’t find there to be gratuitous violence here. If anything, the scene where Julie’s dress is ripped off, leaving her completely naked, may have been gratuitous. But then again, sometimes violence can be portrayed without the shock value. So maybe there is some validity in that criticism. Regardless, considering that the vast majority of Black Americans have either personally had a violent experience with police, I can understand that those scenes will absolutely affect them differently than they do me. And if I had to avert my eyes, and had the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and literally lost my breath, and was brought to tears… well, that’s nothing in comparison. So gratuitous? I don’t think so but was it necessary? Maybe not.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if the backlash is strictly about race. I understand the need for stories to be told authentically. And I understand that the voice and lens of movies and TV and books and art in general are important. But I also have to wonder… why is all the anger saved for the white writers and producers and directors, and their Black contemporaries seem to get a pass? By this I mean there are a LOT of really talented Black writers, producers, directors, etc. Why aren’t they telling these stories instead of making yet another Madea movie, or Girl’s Trip, or a movie about gangs or drugs or basketball? That’s not to say that there’s not a market for all of these topics because there is. And yes, I know that Hollywood is still #SoWhite and movies have to be funded. But more and more actors/artists are creating their own production companies and are putting themselves in positions of deciding what gets made. Need money? GoFundMe. I mean, Spike Lee had no problem raising $1.5 million to make a movie about Black vampires.

Additionally, if Black movies told from a Black lens are going to “get” Hollywood backing, they have to make money. The reason there’s now 12 Madea movies in existence is because people go and see those. When Boo! A Madea Halloween, it pulled in over $25 million opening weekend, as compared to $7.1 million for Birth of a Nation on its opening weekend.

Birth of a Nation was Black written, directed, produced. It was also actively boycotted by many in the Black community, mostly women, due to a past allegation of sexual assault against Nate Parker. A charge, by the way, that he was acquitted of in a court of law.

In the credits of the movie, it is stated that Detroit is an attempt to tell the real story of what happened, and that when possible, the story is based on the recollections of those who were actually there. When details were unavailable, they kind of “filled in” the blanks. So there’s some question about accuracy and authenticity.

But given the reaction to the film, I think it’s clear that we’re not nearly as post-racial as we’d like to think we are. And that there is a lot of complex pain that we as a whole don’t yet know how to talk about. There are hundreds of years of healing that have yet to be healed.