The most urgent filmmaking anybody’s doing in this country right now is by black people with camera phones. Their work comprises a ghastly visual mosaic of mistreatment, at best, and whose victims are international symbols of mourning: Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland. Art is not the intent. These videos are the stone truth. Quaking proof of insult, seasick funerals. Livestreamed or uploaded, or suppressed then suspiciously unearthed as found footage. Last week, the archive grew by two, and now the nation’s roiling.
First, a white dog walker called the police on Christian Cooper, a birder in Central Park. Her unrestrained dog disturbed this man’s peace. He asked that the dog be leashed (the park’s rules, not his) and its affronted owner told him that if he didn’t stop recording their interaction she’d tell the police that an “African-American man is threatening my life.” He kept rolling — actually, he kept directing. “Please call the cops,” he calmly instructs her. “Please tell them whatever you like.” And she does.
But it was how she told on him that you don’t forget. Three times, she informs the dispatcher that this man is her emergency. By the last round, she’s made herself hysterical. The person at the other end can hear distress and can probably sense that the greater victim in this exchange might be her mewling dog, choking because the grip on its leash is so tight. When the call is over, Cooper thanks her — for now endangering him, for living down to herself, for quite a performance of umbrage. This woman has dialed 911, but she’s also got access to an ancient American network of interpersonal fraud. She knows the advantage of her role. So, of course, did he. That’s why his camera’s on. In case. The video would be the counterfactual that might save his life.
That’s not how it went for George Floyd, that same Monday, 1,200 miles away. In this video footage, captured, in part, by Darnella Frazier, the Minneapolis police officers who bore down on his body appeared immune to the cameras trained on them, immune to his gasping pleas for air and his mother. There is a madness in how calm they appear as a grown man rasps and begs. For stretches, one officer stands there like an inanimate object that refuses to hear the bystanders beseeching on Floyd’s behalf. Another officer had rested his knee in the man’s nape, comfortably. For more than eight minutes — eight of George Floyd’s last — it barely moves, as though that’s what God intended napes to be, a kneeler.
The Cooper and Floyd videos capture ancestral false alarms and overreactions, centuries-old hatreds, miserable inequalities. (The dog in one video fares better than the human being in the other.) These videos are part of some newish optic tradition that dates back, at least, to those abstract camcorder images of the L.A.P.D. going to town on Rodney King, stories black people share to keep one another safe and warn others; bystander evidence, filmed by all kinds of people, that has to embarrass the wheels of justice into their slow grind. It’s video that is currently breaking open the United States once again.
This country manufactures only one product powerful enough to interrupt the greatest health and economic crisis it’s probably ever faced. We make racism, the American virus and the underlying condition of black woe. And the rage against it is strong enough to compel people to risk catching one disease in order to combat the other — in scores and scores of American cities, in cities around the world. They’re a tandem now, the pandemic bold-underlining-italicizing what’s endemic to us. The underfunded hospitals, appalling factory conditions and unequal education were readily evident last year, before Covid-19. Now, the inadequacies and inequalities expedite death and compound estrangement. The low-wage workers have been deemed essential yet remain paid inessentially. The numbers of black, Latino and Indigenous people infected, deceased and unemployed are out of whack with their share of the population. And the president has yet to offer his condolences, in earnest.
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So maybe we were due for another round of unrest and conflagration. Maybe, Black Lives Matter and Colin Kaepernick were simply ahead of their time, even if the calls for respect that they marched and knelt for remain absurdly longstanding. This explosion seems meant to occur in the year in which we saw a video of a 25-year-old black man, a runner named Ahmaud Arbery, chased down by white men in Georgia and shot dead, men who went on about their lives for months after.
It had to happen in a year in which police killed a sleeping black woman, Breonna Taylor, wanted on suspicion of nothing. It had to be in the year of lockdowns, masks, in-a-blink job loss and funerals no one could physically attend. It had to be the year whose numbers refer to perfect vision. People could, perhaps, see anew that, when it comes to certain white people, what we call freedom is basically impunity. Freedom-plus. Americans have watched that plus burn outside their homes.
Impunity permits politicians and TV hosts to lie about whatever and the police to shoot rubber bullets at nonprotesters as if they were squirrels. Impunity is what brings black men as different and differently eloquent as the rapper-activist Killer Mike and the Princeton professor Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr. to anger and the verge of tears, in separate appearances before the media on Friday. They both embodied a sentiment of the protests. We’ve been trying to make this country great, but you won’t let us.
Black Americans have come in peace, they’ve come armed. They’ve just been trying to mind their business. Disappointment awaits, regardless. Anytime the racial temperature goes up and hell pays a visit to earth, the disappointment takes a holiday. And you fight. You fight because you’re tired. Yet you’re tired because you’ve been fighting. For so long. In waves, in loops, in vacuums, in vain.
I suppose this is all how I found myself doubled over the kitchen sink on Sunday, bawling into a bowl of greens, a knife in one hand, the other gathered into the loneliest fist that hand had ever made. I was doubled over because Patti LaBelle had wrecked me.
Now, somehow, Patti’s not for everybody. And I don’t mean white people (although I’ve heard the complaints). My mother was a black woman from Philadelphia just like Patti and her feelings remained mixed. Not something you need to know about my otherwise perfect mother; it’s just to say that Patti LaBelle is an unsettled matter. And her unorthodoxy — as a cookbook author, a vocalist and someone who believes that a black woman’s hair ought to be a wonder of the world — makes her all the more beloved to her partisans.
The last song on her 1985 album, “Patti,” is a live cover of a classic written by Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff and released in 1972: “If You Don’t Know Me by Now.” Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes recorded the raw, plangent definitive version; Simply Red the comparatively subdued hit 1989 incarnation. Both are excellent. It’s a perfect song that LaBelle moves into and refurnishes. She flips and flexes every syllable. The word “eye” is elongated so that suddenly there’s an “o” in there. Pure Patti. The chorus — “if you don’t know me by now, you will never, never, never know me” — is left to the men doing her backing vocals, while LaBelle spreads icing all over their cake.
This version is arranged as a march that keeps cresting: big drums, wagging piano, bass that vamps. After four minutes, the band offers her a clearing to do some trapeze work. And this is the moment — in the middle of a pandemic, with the country in some of its worst-ever shape, with protesters on my street damning the police, with black America at yet another wit’s end — that I heard a song I’ve listened to a hundred times like I’ve never heard it before.
“I thought you knew me by now,” she sings, “but you don’t.” She’s off-book as they say, working on mood, instinct and fatigue. “Heh, heh,” she says with a weary laugh before she starts talking to the room.
“You break your back, you break your legs and you break your face, trying to make these people know you in life. But somehow they just don’t wanna try to,” she says and goes on to wonder, “Is it the way I look?” In her story, she’s talking about a man and has a mirror moment. “Self,” she asks, “is it worth it?” And, in her four-alarm soprano, she lets out a naying, “Uh-uh,” only with more “uhs” than I could count. “I’m not going to try to prove myself no more,” she proclaims as her singers back her, firm yet softly, with that chorus (“never, never, never”). For half of the remaining 90 seconds, she is knocking everything off the emotional table she’d spent the previous five minutes setting.
This is not a protest anthem. It’s a lovers-at-a-crossroads jam. But LaBelle is working this crowd. She’s preaching about something that, at my sink, at a crossroads, along with millions of other black people, sounded like a much bigger love. Her exasperation felt transcendently real and timelessly final. Enough.
I heard a woman declaring her value. George Floyd was suspected of having used a counterfeit bill at a corner store, which means his life was worth less than money. I heard her thinking through an ultimatum now being laid down in the streets of this country. You still think we’re monkeys, monsters, beasts, thugs, the living dead, minorities? If you don’t know that a black man, calling for his mother, his dead mother, is so desperate for somebody to hear him that he’s screaming for ghosts — or fears he’s in the process of becoming one; if you don’t know that we, too, can run for leisure and sleep for rest; if you don’t know that this skin is neither your emergency nor an excuse to invent one, that the emergency has tended to be you — by now? — you will never, never, never …
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June 04, 2020 at 12:53AM
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The Videos That Rocked America. The Song That Knows Our Rage. - The New York Times
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