Well before the civil unrest from the summer of 2020 after George Floyd’s murder, activists have been taking to the streets for decades to address the racism and police brutality perpetuated in the USA and on the global front on other countries through the USA and European colonization.
Here is Nicolas Hyacinthe’s artistic representation of the current Civil Rights Movement, demanding accountability and justice for the brutality and dehumanization through racism. This short film captures the movement’s reach to mobilize all people to seek the change needed. Hyacinthe realized this cerebral narrative by weaving together the photographs, videos, and ambient audio that he captured at the “Four Mile March” in Boston on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 2015. While the images in this video are from Boston, they also embody the spirit of protests and protesters against police shootings and systematic violence in Ferguson, Selma, and across the country and the world.
Here, we witness a stark juxtaposition of people from all generations protesting police brutality with the systematic racism at its root coinciding with the large oppressive police presence flanking the protesters. This clear show of police force that is almost unmatched when the protest is about any other topic! A toxic dance between a public demanding freedom & safety for the Black community and cops intimidating & boxing them in. When the assumed role of the police is protection, it’s important to question: is all of this to foster safety or instill fear and perpetuate more harm?
Nine years later, people continue to fill their social media posts or teach white-washed lessons in schools and organizations with frivolous quotes of Martin Luther King Jr. without context or depth to his philosophy and the evolution to his understandings of the struggle – they do so merely as a performative act to claim they somehow stand by racial justice, when in reality the spirit of MLK Jr. was rooted in addressing the anti-capitalistic and anti-military work to dismantle systemic racism.
Nine years later, the same violence upon the Black community continues without much change, as does the USA and European powers perpetuating violence in forms of exploitation, oppression, and genocide in Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia, Palestine, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Turtle Island, and many other occupied lands or exploited lands. If Martin Luther King Jr.’s dreams are to come into fruition, both individual awareness and systemic change need to actually take place in the years to come.
*** All general political and artistic views written in this article are written from the lens and perspective of the artist Nicolas Hyacinthe and the mixed genre editor Prema Bangera and does not reflect the views of the journal.
