Film Review: QUEEN & SLIM

It's Black History Month and I just watched a film about police violence against Black people that was so fine I will be thinking about it for a long time. It was as if GET OUT, the novel Les Misérables, and a prescient biopic on Luigi Mangione were rolled into one. 

Daniel Kaluuya played the lead in both QUEEN & SLIM (2019 release) and in the 2017 psychological thriller GET OUT, a story built atop a "meet the parents" structure. No parents are getting met in Q&S -- though the film is also a love story, a tragic love story along the lines of Romeo & Juliet.

Q&S also reminded me of a Hitchcock film with its prolonged and artfully sustained horror. The Hitchcockian theme of the "guilt of the ordinary person trapped in a criminal situation" is used to great effect by writers Lena Waithe and James Frey, and director Melina Matsoukas makes the most of it. 

Starting from a meet cute date between two unlikely Tinder users, the story gives Queen and Slim ample time to grow into their relationship. Each has a different approach to navigating the world, a different belief system, and little consistency in the way they handle an encounter with law enforcement. At least that's true at first. By the time they run across an unexpected sheriff their approaches start to converge. Jodie Turner-Smith turns in a star performance developing from a rigid, prissy attorney into a grieving family member capable of exercising nuanced moral judgment. 

Slim's father is forced to make a similar moral judgement in a brief scene that will stay with you long after the film concludes.

There is so much going on here: it's also a road trip movie, and the plot is eventually strongly driven by an unspoken shared bucket list.

Slim's choice of response to the moronic howling of a cop with a bullhorn surprised me. I suspect it will surprise you, too.

Throughout the story runs the thread of white privilege. I've always explained this to my fellow white people who deny its existence by asking, Did your teenage kid ever do anything that brought them into contact with police and, if so, were you afraid they would die? No? That's white privilege.

Don't miss this film!

White People Are Running Scared As Their Long Reign Crumbles

Anti-racist blogger Shay Stewart-Bouley of Black Girl in Maine shared news of white backlash against Black History Month in the U.S. generally and targeting her specifically. She posted the above photo to social media platforms with her commentary and the predictable backlash from terrified, angry white people ensued. 

Her analysis of the "It's OK to be White" message is worth a read.

Coincidentally, my weekend kicked off with my 6 year old grandson sharing that he had watched Portland City Councilor Victoria Pelletier read a nasty letter she received and decided to publicize on social media.

(Note: I greatly appreciate my grandchildren's parents for their active anti-racist educational efforts in our mostly white family.)

My grandson remembered Councilor Pelletier from the community television show we do together as he and his mom had been in the studio audience last year. As a young constituent of Portland's 2nd District, he was concerned that people were "being mean" to Councilor Pelletier. 

Yup, me too, and kudos to Pelletier for lifting the rock and showing us the ugly racism that she and other people of color face constantly when elected to public office.

All this on the weekend of the Chinese weather balloon theatrics.

White people locally, nationally, and internationally are expressing their perception of being backed into a corner where their power over others and control of common resources is eroding rapidly. 

NATO, a white supremacist military alliance, has bombed, occupied, and pillaged populations around the globe. Now that Ukraine is being used in a proxy war to weaken China's strongest ally, Russia, the violence is targeting whites -- as it did in air strikes on Yugoslavia in the 1990's.

But NATO and its U.S. masters are watching their economic power slip away. 

This is what working class white people are experiencing domestically as well.

Arguments about fairness and equity fall on deaf ears. The fact that Black households in the U.S. have a mere 11% of the household wealth of white households doesn't matter to these terrified white folks. They can't afford enough food or heat and are panicking. Their healthcare options are pathetic, and access to luxuries like regular dental care are almost non-existent.

Media owned by billionaires have people in the U.S. trained to blame each other rather than the root of their common problems: corporate government that allows, even facilitates, profit from misery. 

Example of a false dichotomy narrative common in the U.S.

Big Pharma and weapons manufacturers spring to mind but there are many more.

The U.S. doing business as NATO is panicking, too. The Ukraine war sanctions on Russia harmed Europe's economy, not Russia's, and hastened the abandonment of the U.S. dollar as a currency for international trade. Billions of dollars and weapons later, Ukraine's military cannot prevail, and it has already lost in the humanitarian sense with neo-Nazis steering the ship of state.

Enter the weather balloon and cue the China-bashing hysteria in the press.

Most likely the PR aspect of hyping this appearance of a hot air balloon (there have been many in the past, but did you ever hear about them?) was to create a pretext for U.S. Secretary of State Blinken to cancel his announced visit to Beijing to meet with President Xi. This small step toward peaceful relations with China had to be stopped by those who want war and are very rapidly arming up in the Pacific region.

White supremacy has had its day. 

Delaying tactics are in some cases hastening its demise. Decisions made from fear are often not logical or ultimately beneficial to those making them.

It's logical to be fearful of losing the major privilege accorded those who appear white. Although they play the victim, white privilege is very much something they benefit from all the time. Enslaving labor plus other plunder of colonized populations and their resources has created an artificial standard of living for white people that could never have endured on a level playing field.

So, as loss of status plus economic disaster overtakes this group, they lash out in myriad ways to stave off the inevitable. 

From the micro level where leaders of color are insulted and threatened to the macro level where NATO moves nuclear weapons into place all over the globe and ramps up anti-China rhetoric, white people are running scared.

Divide & Conquer, Part 3: White v. Human

Source: McGill University

The divide and conquer trope at the heart of the U.S. empire's moral rot is race.

Race is the biologically imaginary distinction between humans based on melanin i.e. skin color.

The fact that white supremacy was first enforced against indigenous people in the Caribbean and North American continent gets muddied by the ideology of Christianity's Doctrine of Discovery where not-white = heathen. 

It took 1619 and the enslavement of African people to start cementing in place a permanent underclass based on the skimpy ideology of skin color-hair texture.

White America has been sitting on a powder keg of race relations ever since, with discontent always brewing, and terrified owners desperate to keep their power over workers.

Enter white supremacy and its unearned benefit, white privilege.

When I was a young child my father pointed out that I was white but that fact didn't make me better than anyone else, just luckier. "Many doors will be open to you that would not be if your skin were a different color," he explained.

Some examples of what dad was talking about:

Dad used the GI bill to get a college education after discharge from the Army. Many Black GI's did not receive this earned benefit. They also did not receive GI bill support for home ownership as millions of white veterans did.

This set up Black families in the U.S. for generational disparities in net worth. As reported by the Federal Reserve:

In the 2019 survey, White families have the highest level of both median and mean family wealth: $188,200 and $983,400, respectively. Black and Hispanic families have considerably less wealth than White families. Black families' median and mean wealth is less than 15 percent that of White families, at $24,100 and $142,500, respectively. Hispanic families' median and mean wealth is $36,100 and $165,500, respectively. 

The 1619 Project is a collection of research-based essays on how white supremacy warped not only our hearts and souls but the actual structures of government (think electoral college). It also argues that racism hurt labor organizing. What true strength in numbers can there be if white workers don't stand shoulder to shoulder with workers of color? How will labor stand up to capital if solidarity is rotted from within by racism?

The Project's authors also cite the dreadful state of public transportation in this country as an effect of racist public policies based on white flight from cities to suburbs. 

The horrifying state of policing likewise is a logical outgrowth of slave patrols and the notion that any white man with a gun is entitled to rob any person of color of their freedom. How many #sayhisnameDonovanLewis cases will there need to be before white people stop funding more and more violent police forces out of fear? 

Police gunning down unarmed, even sleeping, Black and brown people is part of the very fabric of the U.S. Now, with cell phone cameras and bodycams for police, even white people can see the problem.

And as Chris Hedges argued recently, a low-income white person without health care, living precariously as the U.S. empire declines, clings to gun ownership as the final bulwark against humiliation.

Black majority cities like Jackson, Mississippi and Flint, Michigan go without potable water for years.

Mortality and other indicators of health are significantly different by race, both pre and post Covid.

Source: Ben & Jerry's

Mass incarceration for a myriad of victimless crimes (cannabis possession springs to mind) denies Black families of their parents, and Black communities of their voters. And keeps ex-cons in the prison labor force many compare to slavery, but out of the labor force where they would compete with white workers.

Jennifer Schulte aka "BBQ Becky" became famous for calling police in Oakland on Black men who were grilling with charcoal in an undesignated area of a public park.

White women have played an outsized role in demonizing Black people just for existing. Emmett Till was lynched at age 14 after white adult Carolyn Bryant Donham lied about him sexually harrassing her, but a grand jury in Mississippi still failed to indict Donham for her role in Till's death.

Media has pushed the narrative of an alleged criminal class based on melanin so relentlessly that even Black and brown people are more likely to identify what a young man of color is holding as a gun when it's actually a cell phone or a soda can.

Liberals like 3rd grade teacher Jane Elliott could easily demonstrate the educational impacts of separate, unequal treatment based on eye color, but that did nothing to change systemic racism.

Some believe, and I'm among them, that reparations is the only thing likely to effect real progress.

It would be hard to find a more divisive issue than reparations. Unless it is the first Black president of the U.S. -- a neoliberal who did almost nothing to address economic disparities by race, but allowed a lot of white people to pretend that electing him had ushered in an era of post-racism. Uh huh.

Skowhegan Elementary Teacher: Many Teachers Want Mascot Retired, But Board Does Not Listen To Us

As the adult child of an alcoholic, I experience stress around listening to excuses. Ironically, for the last 25 years I've worked as a public school teacher and listening to excuses is part of the job. 

This condition of mine made it challenging to go door-to-door in Skowhegan last Sunday. 

My canvassing partner and I listened to several versions of stuff white people say when they are excusing their own failure to show up for racial justice. 

The gist of what they told us went something like this: I am in my [white privilege] comfort zone and I won't do anything that might take me out of that zone. 

Of course no one actually used the words white privilege. Its tremendous power rests on its pervasive yet invisible nature.

The person who articulated it best shared that they only leave online political comments under a disguised name. They gave the example that they are against Trump, but if they had a bumper sticker that was anti-Trump, someone would trash their car. This person also thought the mascot controversy was fairly new and was quite surprised to find that Native people have been requesting that it change since 1990. They characterized the eventual retirement of the "Indian" team name as inevitable, but they weren't sure if it would take another 5 or even 10 years. And they certainly weren't going to help hasten the process even though they freely admitted it would be the right thing to stop being offensive in the 21st century.

I don't see why this is a problem, is what several of the less politically aware folks told canvassers. Many others stated that they were of two minds, that they could see both sides, clearly feeling that this was the perfect excuse not to get involved.

We hope the mascot will have retired by spring, and we await the February 28 school board meeting with interest.

However, if the pretendians are still around come spring, then we'll canvass again. As we did last Sunday, we'll offer information on the local history of Native people, why the American Psychological Association found Native mascots harmful to all students, and copies of lovely posters reminding us that we are on indigenous land.

Summary of Door Notes Sheets

Skowhegan canvass Feb. 10, 2019

TOTAL RESPONSES: 18

FOR CHANGE: 7 (39%)

AGAINST CHANGE: 2 (11%)

NEUTRAL/ SEE BOTH SIDES / IDK: 9 (50%)

1. Support, concerned with how we get there
2. Support, has high school kids
3. Saw both side, no kids
4. Yes!!!
5. Yes!!!
6. Thinks stay same, a middle school kid
7. Didn’t open door, wants to keep mascot, gave public comment
8. Hadn’t heard much, in support of change, not interested in being involved
9. No opinion, no convo
10. 50/50, went to the high school, receptive, took our handouts
11. 50/50, thinks we should educate, we’re doing good work, husband’s school in Sanford changed name. Did not want to sign anything or take papers. Seemed a little defensive/cautious. Doesn’t think mascot was initially meant to upset anyone.
12. Not down to talk
13. Supportive / but attached to name. The longer we spoke the more he was convinced. “If we change this, we’ll have to change more.” Thought mascot was degrading but not name.
14. Sympathetic, not willing to take action.
15. Didn’t know much about the controversy, talked about pride, took historical info & Hope’s essay
16. Haven’t given it much thought, don’t see why the controversy is “so ugly”
17. Did not engage
18. In favor of change, Skowhegan elementary school teacher, said many teachers want change but school board doesn’t listen to staff

I find #18 particularly compelling. MSAD 54 school board directors, are you listening?

How To Save Your Friends And Loved Ones From Hate Groups

Not Your Mascot Maine leaders tabling at the Skowhegan River Days festival August, 2015

Being involved with sharing hate language hosted by the Skowhegan Indian Pride group online has me in a quandry: how to avoid ignoring racism while not fanning its flames.

There are moles in the SIP group that take screenshots of the most disturbing posts and share them outside of the group. I share SIP's nastier posts by emailing them to the school board chair, the superintendent, and assistant superintendent. I do this to emphasize that continuing to have a racist team name holds space for ugly threats and demeaning posts aimed at Native people and, in particular, Native women.

December 2018 Skowhegan (Maine School Administrative District 54) school board meeting hears testimony from Penobscot Tribal Ambassador Maulian Dana while members of the Penobscot Youth Council (in red, to show solidarity with Native women and girls who are the targets of violence) look on.

That's on the one hand, and it's very local. The upcoming public forum on January 8 is scheduled for the night of an away basketball game, so the booster moms and dads won't be in town. Coincidence? I doubt it, because the boosters are coming on strong for retiring an outdated practice that is actively harming their children.

The school board chair, on the other hand, deliberately stacked the deck of speakers at their last meeting when 100 people showed up to support retiring the mascot. Her first several speakers were alumni who cling to their identification as "Indians." Some of these folks literally cry when faced with the possibility that the school's use of the name will come to an end. Dixie Ring then conveniently "forgot" the last speaker on the list, Dr. Susan Cochran, a known opponent of continuing to use the Indian name.

Playing fair is not a value of SIP. Respect is not a value of SIP. What, if anything, will change their hearts and minds?

Kevin James at the December 2018 school board meeting. Photo credit: Jeff Kirlin

White silence in the face of racism is a privilege that I don't want to exercise. I do a lot of reading about white on black or white on Latinx racism. I coach myself to speak up in hair salons, in schools, in person and on line, calling out racism.

The culture of politeness at any cost is what allows most white people to go about their business imagining that "things are better now" for people of color and indigenous people in the U.S.

A lifetime of silence in the face of microaggressions as well as blatant racism is white people's insurance policy for continuing to have first dibs on the best jobs, housing, health care and educational opportunities.

Photo of Shane Johnson from "Inside the Radical, Uncomfortable Movement to Reform White Supremacists"
by Wes Enzinna in Mother Jones July/August 208

This fascinating article about a man trying to coach himself out of a white supremacist hate group rocked my world yesterday. (Shane Johnson's picture reminded me of a desperate addict who terrorized our community last year before he was apprehended.)

Johnson was raised in a KKK family and is now a father who wants to raise his child differently. He experienced racial hatred as a counterweight to being poorly educated and economically disadvantaged. When he and others attempt to leave groups like the KKK, they find parallels to addiction recovery in the process.

The article offers a theory of the appeal of hate groups of any kind:

Arie Kruglanski, a social psychologist at the University of Maryland and a Holocaust survivor, hit upon a related discovery: While researchers had believed that some combination of class, gender, geography, intelligence, and age determined who was most likely to become a white supremacist, Kruglanski found that psychological signposts were better predictors of radicalization. He called these factors “the three Ns”-- need, narrative, and network. It doesn’t matter if they are skinheads or jihadis; everyone who gets involved in hate movements has a deep urge to participate in a greater cause. Yet that cause, Kruglanski argued, needn’t be destructive.

To successfully deradicalize a neo-Nazi, a new, constructive set of Ns— which might stem from education, a job, a partner—would have to replace the old, hateful one.

This theory resonated with so many aspects of the struggle to retire the Indian mascot and team name. Scrolling back through the emotional pleas of SIP members I've been following these many years, I hear their conviction that belonging to SIP makes them stronger, greater and safer. 

Also noted in the article was the transformative power of meeting an actual human being who is from the hated group. This reminded me of a high school student three years ago who was leading a SIP effort and then changed his mind. Zachary Queenan was persuaded to change his position after hearing Native people testify to the harms done by dehumanizing them and appropriating sacred aspects of their culture.

My sister Hope Savage's November speech to the school board about her own transformation from thinking it was ok to dress her little boy in an "Indian" costume for Halloween has been shared and viewed 7,600+ times on this blog. Her theme: I once thought it was harmless to appropriate Native culture -- but then, I listened.

I was just invited to share Hope's powerful words at an MLK weekend event in a nearby town as she will be away on that date.

Lots of people want to hear about the power of listening to effect positive changes in our own lives.

So, what have I learned so far in my education? How can we persuade acquaintances, friends and loved ones to stop belonging to hate groups?

One major point seems to be avoid dehumanizing language, insults, or derogatory remarks.  We all have the three Ns at work within us. Recognize our common ground in our common humanity. And keep listening.

A Frankly Rude Post About The Crimes Of Bush Sr.

 For shame, President Obama, seen here awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom
to known war criminal President George H.W. Bush.

The recent death of former President George Bush Sr. has people gushing here in Maine. Combined with the recent death of his wife, former First Lady Barbara Bush, it is a pretext for sending thoughts and prayers to a family distinguished in its ability to produce Nazi collaborators and mass murderers. 

Also, the same gushy people are chiding the rest of us about how "rude" it is to criticize someone who has just died.

Typical comments are that they are going to ignore politics while the family grieves. Why are critics of Bush's legacy being so "divisive" they ask?

Here's why.

Critiquing the foreign and domestic policies of Bush Sr. doesn't occur in a vacuum. The celebrity worship machine that keeps our corporate masters firmly in power goes into overdrive when someone dies. I have now lived through the murderous policies and rampant racism of several prominent white men who are then glorified nearly as saints once they pass on to whatever tortures await them in the bardo. 

And white supremacy above all else requires us to be "nice" in public while turning a blind eye to the violence and suffering of non-white people, offstage as it were.

The mainstream media do a very good job of hiding what we should not see; in fact, that is the purpose of their existence.

A public thinker who maintains and writes for the blog BlackgirlinMaine had this to say yesterday:




"Niceness is...the fuel that keeps white supremacy in place." Yup.

One of the reasons that people want to love on Bush Sr. so much at this point in history is that they love to hate on the crass, rude, white supremacist demagogue who is in the White House at the moment. Bush Sr. earned their accolades when he called the candidate of his own party a "blowhard" and said he would not vote for him. 

Because the spokesperson for corporate pillage should go to Ivy League college and law school and always speak soothing words of politeness while looking dignified and well-groomed. If not, they threaten to topple the whole rotten system.

Almost every problem vexing the U.S. body politic at the moment can be traced back to the policies of Bush Sr.

• Enriching big oil (whence came his family fortune) and empowering climate change deniers.

• Asylum seekers fleeing violence and economic devastation in Central America.

• Mass incarceration of people of color, many on minor drug possession charges, and racist policing in general.

• Destruction of the civil society, infrastructure and people of Iraq.

• Torture and assassination coverups by the CIA.

• White color criminals emboldened by pardons from the highest office in the land.

But let's all be "nice" while we ignore the actual humans who have suffered and still suffer under these conditions.

We got a thousand points of light 

For the homeless man 

We got a kinder, gentler, 

Machine gun hand...

From Neil Young's Bush-era song "Rockin' in the free world"

After all, isn't our illusion that we're kinder, gentler the very foundation of our white privilege?

Super Racist Summer In The USA, And It's Only Half Over #JusticeforNia

Nia Wilson, 18, was murdered on a train platform in Oakland, California July 22 by a white male stranger with a knife.

I was partway into a post about continuing to be amazed by the sheer volume of trivial calls to police because people of color are just existing and doing the things we all do: shop, mow the lawn, play in the sprinkler, park our cars, etc. I can't help but feel like there should be a big penalty for calling 911 about nonsense (and there probably is, so what we actually need is enforcement).

I started compiling some of this summer's stories and I had gotten this far:

Black woman says CVS manager called police because she had wrong coupon
Chicago Sun Times 7/14/18

#SummerJobWhileBlack: Child Gets Cops Called on Him for Delivering Newspapers
The Root  7/11/18

when I heard the shocking news that a black high school girl had been killed on a BART train platform in Oakland by a white man slitting her throat. Nia Wilson was pronounced dead at the scene while her assailant John Cowell fled after also stabbing her sister Latifah. He was arrested in the most peaceful way possible on another BART platform later that day, enjoying the white privilege that even murderers can count on.




Latifah said the man never spoke to either sister, and security camera footage showed he rode the same train car with them and got off at the same stop, attacking quickly and without warning. Cowell has a record of violence, was released from prison in May, and no motive other than racial hatred has been suggested for the murder.

Here's where the second civil war kicks in: Wilson's family and friends were holding a vigil to mourn her on Tuesday in Oakland when a white man in a red MAGA hat showed up to disrupt the vigil.

An alleged member of the white supremacist group The Proud Boys got caught slippin’ during the rally in Oakland yesterday #townbusiness #ogun pic.twitter.com/nZL9L57fSH

— Tariq Nasheed (@tariqnasheed) July 24, 2018

He was beaten by the crowd. Was he a provocateur as many have suggested? Several comments chided the videographers saying they were providing police with information that would be used to brutalize black people.

Photo credit: artiecrafts / Instagram

An announced Proud Boys gathering in Oakland that same night at a bar drew many in the crowd to gather after the vigil. Proud Boys claim to be anti-immigrant nationalists who are not necessarily white supremacists. Hmmm...

Comments on the video of the MAGA hat guy getting moderately beat up and chased away promised that if he showed up in Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans or other places, he wouldn't have gotten off that lightly. Also this comment:

Reggie Locke Tried to be bad white privileges don't work in da hood from real people


For context, Oakland was the site earlier in the season of a white person weaponizing police call to 911, the infamous BBQ Becky, who tried to get police to stop black people from using charcoal briquettes to cook food at Lake Merritt park.

The last thing I'm going to say today is: go see the film Sorry To Bother You, which is set in Oakland and critiques vulture capitalism and racism from several black points of view.

I'll leave you with national journalist Shaun King's words today on Nia's vicious murder and what it says about the horrible mess we (yes, white people, talking to you) have gotten ourselves into.