In April of 1992, I was living in Prairie Village, Kansas. We had moved there years earlier from Finchville, Kentucky, a small farming town on the outskirts of Louisville. We moved for my father’s job, so that he could lead a Baptist Church in Kansas City, Missouri and apply the pastoral skills he had just refined in seminary.

Prarie Village was no Kansas City. It was a white, wealthy suburb with low-crime and nationally recognized public schools. Despite weekly journeys into the big city for church, my childhood consciousness was totally disconnected from the realities of Kansas City proper. In my first nine years of life, I have nearly no memory of recognizing homelessness, poverty, or other forms of social exclusion. Instead I was learning basic mastery over reading, writing, math and science at Belinder elementary, a school with hundreds of students, dozens of teachers, yet only a handful of people of color in all. As I recall it, my universe in those years was almost exclusively white.

Given this background, what do I remember about the LA riots? What memories do I have the spontaneous uprising that drove national news and congressional hearings for months? Almost none at all. I have a vague memory that it happened. And that’s about it.

However, I do remember the beating of Rodney King. Seeing footage of the incident on syndicated television was my first introduction to police brutality, one that penetrated in ways that few other events had. Prior to watching that brutal abuse of police power, my only real awareness of the police had come from visits with my grandfather down in Texas, who had been a motorcycle cop for much of his life. Yet there I was in our family’s downstairs TV room witnessing horrific violence on the part of those who I had been told only existed to prevent it.

Looking back, I believe that later that year was when I started to recognize other basic social injustices in the world, inspired also by a summer family trip that was my first journey outside of the developed world. Though one can only ever speculate about the pivotal moments in their childhood awareness, I know that 1992 represented a major opening in the way I was starting to see the world, openings which were nourished a couple years later when my family moved back to Kentucky and, for the first time ever, I started at a thoroughly multi-racial public school.

Since those Prairie Village years my racial consciousness has continued to be nourished, by intentional activism, continued travel, and by more than a decade of working in diverse urban neighborhoods. I now recognize systemic oppression and racial injustice almost everywhere I go, both in the United States and beyond. Much of my life’s work is about helping to correct the imbalances that structural racism has created in our city and our world, partnering with both cops and former prisoners to create real justice for all. Yet I will never forget how much I simply did not see in the world during those early Belinder days.

Without question, I consider myself lucky to have grown out of that childhood ignorance. I recognize now that there is nothing which guarantees our social consciousness will automatically evolve, and achieving this is a mixture of good fortune, good friends, and serious intentional effort. Yet the question remains- Why is it that mainstream consciousness around racial injustice can be so limited? What prevented me and millions of other Americans from really knowing what was going on with the 92’ LA riots? Why were the uprising’s connections to systemic social exclusion not more immediately obvious to all?

Through both academic study and grassroots practice, I have come to see that a part of how racism works is through the conditioning of mainstream consciousness. For me today, racism is defined as the systemic concealment of the beauty, brilliance, and power of marginalized people of color. Equally important, racism hinges on the obscuring of the violence and brutality of more legitimized white actors, of which the officers who beat Rodney King are just one of far too many possible examples.

This definition of racism was inspired by reading of philosopher Charles Mills. His book,  The Racial Contract, refers to our mental conditioning as the ‘epistemology of ignorance’ through which we learn to see and not see reality in critical ways. Importantly, as Mills argues, this negative epistemology is reinforced by segregation and the criminalization of space. As a result, many white Americans will never even venture into those parts of their cities that might challenge some of their fundamental assumptions about how the world works, and for whom. Because space helps to preserve the invisibility of so much racial injustice, it becomes that much easier for uncritical Americans to support or just simply ignore widespread disinvestments in communities of color.

In April of 1992, my social sight was still overwhelmingly conditioned by the dominant structures of perception. Mills offers us a poignant metaphor for understanding how this conditioning works. He compares a white person living in the United States to a fish swimming in the ocean. The fish is effectively unaware of the basic fact that its reality is entirely enabled by water, the substance that allows it to move efficiently around and to navigate its environment with relative ease. Likewise, the white person is typically unaware of the ways their social reality is constructed through whiteness and how that construction benefits their pathways and possibilities.

One essential difference though is that the fish actually needs the water to survive. The white person, in contrast, only needs the privileging benefits of whiteness to continue living as they know it. Their short-term social and economic lives may depend on the ongoing privileging of whiteness, but our biological lives certainly do not. To keep moving forward – and to keep from moving backwards – we must create real strategies for dismantling the systems of seeing that shape so much of our social perception, and for tackling the widespread social exclusion that these systems enable.

We did direct actions against banks, forced the Federal Reserve to hold hearings in the community, we negotiated with bank presidents, and we even created our own people’s bank, called the South Central People’s Federal Credit Union.  We were, as my now-deceased comrade Clyde Johnson used to say, a raggedy coalition of determined folks.

All this occurred in the wake of the Savings & Loan crisis when the policy solution was a humungous bailout that favored the banks and hurt the people.  We used the facts of that narrative to teach people that the government, aka the people, subsidized the banking industry with low-cost loans, insured deposits, and yes, when things got tough, bailouts for the biggest.  For those reasons, we asserted, banking should be considered a right.

This all made sense to our members who had never received their proper measure of fairness or investment from banks that the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA) promised, but never delivered.  But communicating the painful consequences of financial discrimination to others –– to the press, to politicians, to people who didn’t suffer discrimination –– remained an uphill battle.  “Banks are businesses,” they would say.  And as our country veered neo-liberally towards deregulation, we were constantly reminded to leave business to the business people and banking to the bankers.

And then the riots happened.

The beating of Rodney King was shown over and over and over on television to the entire world. (“Are all L.A. cops white?” asked friends in New York.)  The fires that could be seen from the big windows of my eighth floor downtown office where I was teaching my Community Scholars class, this time, unlike Watts, were not isolated, but were in many communities. In Pico-Union.  In Hollywood.  In Mid-City.  And in South L.A.

Police abuse coupled with disinvestment became problems that affected more people than its victims.  For a minute.  The streets of L.A. were absent police and black men could walk freely.  For a minute.  A window was open.  We all could see the unseeable, or at least that which many had been trained not to see.

I  looked around at my class of community leaders.  Robin Cannon from Concerned Citizens of South L.A.  Leonardo Vilchis from Union de Vecinos.  Sister Diane Donoghue from Esperanza Community Housing was visiting.  I was grateful to be in a rare room in the company of many solutions at a time when the city was exploding with rage and confusion about its problems.

As coincidence would have it, the day following the riot weekend was one of those days I was scheduled to testify in Congress about the arcane business of disinvestment and community reinvestment.  I took a redeye to D.C. to maximize the time I could be with Miles and Chelsea, my now-grown kids, who were then maybe five and six years old.

The hearing was presided over by Esteban Torres and was generated as a response to a big study by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that revealed that people of color weren’t getting loans from the banks.  And that was news to the press, the politicians, and people who actually got loans from banks.

Here are Congressman Torres’ opening remarks from that hearing…

And excerpts from my own testimony:

The riots brought all these facts and figures into a deeper, palpable relief that now included the pain and the consequences of deprivation and segregation.

The riots prompted the National Credit Union Administration to finally approve a charter for the South LA People’s Federal Credit Union as well as several others around the country after over a decade of silence.

Because of the riots, forty mainstream bankers joined Carlton Jenkins, president of black-owned Founders Bank on a community reinvestment tour of South L.A.

After the riots, Bank of America set up an emergency loan fund for small businesses with very favorable underwriting criteria and actually got money into South L.A. businesses.

A window may have opened, but the foundation of assumptions remained the same.  The forty bankers were accompanied by a five-car police escort, muddying the message that South L.A. was worthy of investment.

Bank of America had to scramble to set up a repayment system for their loans when the businesses came to pay them back because they had assumed that was never going to happen.

And so it went.

Bank de-regulation continued, expanded, and extended.  Sub-prime loans became so profitable that redlining was recreated in a new form –– not this time by denying credit, but instead, by offering the worst kind of credit ever.  It was bad when you couldn’t leverage your savings with a loan to buy a house and then build some stability and wealth pass on to your kids.  But it was way worse to get a bad loan and then lose your savings, your home, and your community.

Our nation’s first response, again, was to help the big banks who created that situation, leaving communities like South L.A., to fend for themselves as homes were shuttered and services defunded.  We are left again to depend on the resiliency of our own organizations and relationships and fortitude to  rethink and rework what self-determination, dignity, and respect can mean in an age of waste, growing inequality, and a preferential option for the rich.

Yet I have every confidence that we will figure it out.

Mama Toya

On April 27, 1992, my mother had to make probably one of the most difficult decisions in her life—take my grandmother off life-support. I was 8 years-old and I remember standing in the hallway, outside Mama Toya’s room because the doctors and nurses said I was too young to see her. Her long battle with Colon Cancer was finally over, a painful disease that transformed a vibrant and resilient woman into a frail 40-pound shell of a person. She was finally at peace. The pillar of our family left this earth as Los Angeles was at the brink of burning in flames.

Victoria Quintanilla, better know to us as Mama Toya or Niña Toya, arrived to the United States in 1986, six years after my mother came to Los Angeles and three years after I was born. Originally from Nueva Conception, Chalatenango, she made the journey to San Salvador on her own in search for better opportunities when she was very young. She was only able to obtain a third-grade education, although she always dreamed of becoming a school teacher. Due to the limited education opportunities available to girls, especially those from the countryside, my grandmother made a living as a street vendor, selling her “world famous” yuca with cabbage and turkey sandwiches. She never married and raised two children on her own, Jorge and Martha (my mother). Her Catholic faith formed her core values and beliefs and made sure that despite her hardships, she could never lose her faith in God. Thanks to her I learned about San Martin de Porres, patron saint of the poor and of racial tolerance.

El Salvador was was in the middle of a Civil War that seemed as though it would never end, and had already taken my uncle Jorge, Mama Toya’s only son. Any hope of finding him after he disappeared was slowly dissipating. After all, he was very involved with the movement led by the FMLN. Alone in San Salvador and poor, my grandmother decided to make the trek to the States. What was a new family living in Pico-Union turned into a packed house with five kids and Mama Toya, all in a one-bedroom. We eventually moved to a two-bedroom apartment in South LA a year later.

Although she hated it here at first, her fearlessness never stopped her from adapting to new environments. Mama Toya found a new community of friends at St Thomas the Apostle Church, on Pico and Normandie. She learned to explore the city by bus and I never left her side. I have the fondest memories of exploring Downtown and our neighborhood with Mama Toya, and having spanakopitas at Papa Cristo’s after mass. She taught me how to be strong, independent, and be proud of being different.

After a few years in the States, Mama Toya developed problems with her digestive system, and she was afraid to tell us. After all, she was undocumented, lacked health care, and she was not one to show any weakness. Over time, her health continued to deteriorate until she was diagnosed with Colon Cancer. The prognosis was devastating to the entire family and money was scarce. My oldest sister Carolina put off college to be her full-time caretaker and we all had to pick up our own weight around the house, including watching over Ricardito, the newest addition to the family. My parents didn’t like to talk about Mama Toya’s condition, but I knew that the possibility of her dying was real.

At the beginning of 1992, the chances of her beating Cancer were becoming slim. Her last few months alive were spent at LA County-USC Medical Center. The last time I saw her, she could barely talk and was barely recognizable. What was about to happen to Los Angeles was the last thing on our minds. Before she passed away, Mama Toya told my mother that she did not want to be buried in the United States.  The trauma of the Civil War and US involvement in state-funded terrorism left a bitter taste in her month. Her remains did not deserve to be in the States. And two days before all hell broke lose, she passed away.

It felt so sudden and there was little time for preparation. But it was a culmination of years of neglect, lack of resources, and just straight up poverty that led to that moment. For both Los Angeles and the Cornejo family. On the corner of Florence and Normandie is where it all began on April 29th. Meanwhile, that morning, on LaBrea and Jefferson, we were having Mama Toya’s service at Spalding Mortuary. One of the few black-owned businesses in our neighborhood, the mortuary was spared from arson that day. Mama Toya looked so peaceful that morning when I walked over to her casket, that I forgot that the looters were waiting for our service to end before blowing up the gas station next door. We quickly walked back home and ironically, losing our neighborhood during the unrest was the distraction we needed to deal with the loss of the most important person in our family. For the next six days, we were forced to stay indoors to protect us from the smoke, while my mother prepared the last details for sending Mama Toya’s body to El Salvador.

For much of my adolescence, I felt so much pain, anger, and confusion around April every year. I lost the person who I went to church with, walked to school with, and ate dinner with every night. And every time I left the house, I was reminded of what we lost in so many ways. Twenty years later, it feels like only yesterday, Mama Toya left us while LA crumbled.

But it wasn’t just the verdicts in the King beating, by happenstance caught on surreptitious video by George Holliday, that stoked the maelstrom to be.  Echoes of today and the shooting death of the unarmed Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida by self-appointed neighborhood watcher George Zimmerman, there had been another shooting of an unarmed black teenager before siegu [Hangul for 4/29], April 29.

On the morning of March 16, 1991, 15-year-old high school student Latasha Harlins stopped in the Empire Liquor Market Deli on Figueroa near Manchester to buy a bottle of orange juice.  She put the juice in her backpack, holding the money for the item as she came to the counter.  The 51-year-old Soon Ja Du, a Korean national, behind the counter assumed the girl was trying to steal from her store and they got into a heated argument.  Du grabbed at Latasha’s backpack and the girl struck her.  Latasha then threw the orange juice bottle on the counter and turned to leave, whereupon Du shot her in the back of the head killing here instantly.  Ultimately Judge Joyce Karlin would essentially exonerate Du, convicted of manslaughter but given probation and no jail time   Karlin faced a recall that failed – years later she would go on to serve on the Manhattan Beach City Council for two terms — and Empire was firebombed during the unrest.

That Wednesday of the verdicts the city held its collective breath.  I was sitting at my desk at the then as now progressive funder of organizing, the Liberty Hill Foundation in Santa Monica.  I was their outreach person then.   A few minutes after three that afternoon, listening to KNX radio, the news broke.  As the head shaking went though the office, executive director Michele Prichard sent the staff home.  Gilda was teaching Community Scholars at UCLA in a downtown office. Gilda would normally drive Robin Cannon home, a community leader in the class who lived in South Central.  That night, Robin asked not to be taken home and instead spend the night at our house.

The nearby Vons in our Mid-City area on Pico at Fairfax was looted but prevented from burning by the workers and some neighbors.  Downtown at Parker Center of the LAPD, the late Michael Zinzun of the Coalition Against Police Abuse was in the demo there against the cops.  As chronicled by L.A. Weekly reporter Jim Crogan in their subsequent publication Inside the L.A. Riots, Michael stated, “The community has got to realize that an unstable black community means an unstable L.A.”

By the early hours a rough lull took hold but it wouldn’t last. The next day Gilda, me and the kids and our friends’ Dan and Kim and Kim’s two young sons (one of whom is a physician now) hunkered down in their duplex on Ogden.  The sequence of events are a bit hazy to me these days, but at some point a few of us were walking around the neighborhood.  We encountered this tough older lady who with her friends and her pistol in her apron, prevent some knuckleheads from torching the Texaco station.   My dad Dikes was alive then and living with us but away visiting relatives in Kansas City.

On Friday Gilda and the kids left for the Valley then Cambria to stay with friends. That morning I went with Sarah Cooper, the then director of the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, a lefty repository on Vermont in South Central.  I was on the Board and we drove down to the Library and were thankful it hadn’t burned.  It turned out Chester Murray, the Library’s handyman who lived nearby, had gone out bravely on the streets talking to cats he knew in the area and got them to leave the building alone.

Like any shaky petty bourgeois homeowner, I stayed, as rumors, including, I recall,  a flyer to this effect, that the Crips and Bloods would burn our neighborhood.  As I’ve previously recounted in a piece called “Destructive Engagement” for a collection of essays edited by my friend and fellow writer Jervery Tervalon called Geography of Rage released on the 10th anniversary of ’92, armed with a handgun and Jack Daniels for courage — a bad combination in any circumstance — I watched the news and guarded the homestead.  Saturday, sober, I went out to take pics in our neighborhood and a Japanese American photographer was also out and about and asked to hang with me so nobody would mistake him for Korean.

It would be nice to think that in 20 years, with the first and some might predict only black president of the U.S., that race and issues of abuse under color of authority were no longer factors in this country.  But if anything, recent news from Trayvon Martin, Kendrick McDade here in Pasadena – another unarmed black teenager shot, this time by the police – to the Supreme Court saying that it’s okay to strip search arrestees on minor charges, seems we’re going further back than forward.  The case arose concerning Albert Florence, who was riding as a passenger when his wife was stopped by New Jersey state police for speeding.  He was arrested on a warrant for an unpaid traffic ticket, which in fact had been paid.  He was strip searched twice while spending six days locked up.

Did I mention Florence is black?  Or how about Arizona banning Chicano studies books from the curriculum.

But let me end on a positive note; while looking up dates and such for this piece, I chanced upon an announcement for an outdoor listening party at USC in honor of the 40th anniversary of Marvin Gaye’s landmark What’s Going On album.  This event was sponsored by Professor Josh Kun, who also co-curated the well-done exhibit, Trouble in Paradise: Music and Los Angeles, 1945-1975, at the  Grammy Museum.

And so, I leave you then with the words of Marvin Gaye,

Picket lines and picket signs

Don’t punish me with brutality

Talk to me, so you can see

Oh, what’s going on…”

Samy’s Camera up in flames – taken from SgtWyatt on YouTube.

It’s difficult to write about how the unrest affected me as a child, I was too young to understand what was going on. My sister, 8 years old at the time, remembers us watching the news and getting scared to see places not far from us getting looted. I still recall the sirens, the smoke in the sky, the countless burnt-down buildings and hearing only the unfamiliar word ‘riots’ to explain them.

My father remembers the time well. The snipers on the roofs of Hollywood Blvd, the arrival of the National Guard, the realization that “LA was burning down” while driving home past curfew and seeing the city from the top of a hill. The sadness he felt for Rodney King, for the African-American community and for those in the streets “attacking shops in their own neighborhoods because they couldn’t do anything else. All that anger and nowhere to put it. It brought tears to my eyes.”

It was a surreal time he remembers, made even more so by his own experience in the film industry. At the time, my father was working as a sound engineer on a film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme called “Universal Soldier”:

“We were on [the sound] stage with Van Damme in the Valley. It was the day after the verdict. As this day goes on, the phone does not stop ringing. People are calling us to tell us what’s happening out there cause we’re in this room with no radio or television. The phone gets red hot after a while, so we ask him if we can break early, to go be with our families and understand what’s really happening. And the curfew had just been announced.”

Van Damme wouldn’t budge. Idolizing his own image on the screen, he told the crew “No. I bring in all my guns, we stay here and finish.”

This absurd episode revealed “the complete schism between the entertainment business and reality” to my father. ‘The show must go on’ as the old adage goes. It also gives an insight into Hollywood’s own distorted idea of what reality actually is: itself. Unfortunately, too many commentators tend to confuse the two as well.

In 1992, a week after the LA unrest, a journalist interrogates 2Pac on Hollywood’s role in the ‘riots’ by the way it portrays African-Americans, displaying an extraordinary lack of understanding of why people took to the streets in the first place and what this unrest means in a deeper sense:

My father likens this divide between Hollywood and the rest of the world, to other rich enclaves allowed to exist in their own bubbles. “Beverly Hills at the time was so tightly guarded by the police, it was under complete lockdown. People could walk around and go about their day as usual. Nobody in there knew the reality of what was outside.”

Twenty years on, 2Pac’s words still ring true “The only thing America respects is power and power concedes nothing. After the LA Riots, they tried to calm us down and nothing changed since.”

Looking back, that in itself is almost inconceivable.

I must have heard about it, we must have brought it up in a class or friends talking around the lunch table. But I don’t remember. I had just hurt both my legs badly playing soccer, and was focused on doing well in school so I could get the hell out of Tucson and that’s what I remember. But Los Angeles? Los Angeles meant a lot of things to me, but it mostly meant the film Stand and Deliver, which I feel like I must have been made to watch about a hundred times in Junior High (though it might have been only two or three).

I didn’t mind because it meant Lou Diamond Phillips who I had a mad crush on at age 13. It also meant this lesson drummed into us over and over again: school is how you get out of poverty and yes, you can do it, you can even do calculus (I couldn’t really do calculus). Looking back a lot of other things overshadowed that message for a lot of people.  Like reality.

Now I would prefer a message that all of us need to come out of poverty together through social change, not by sling-shotting individuals out through education. But it’s still a great film, and I still have a crush on Lou Diamond Phillips. It’s a fact that nerdy white kids like me and my brothers didn’t have any real troubles with the life (because we weren’t cool enough for it and we lived too far out) despite the side of town we lived on, but Tucson had its gangs and everyone wanted to be hard like those kids in East LA, everyone had family or stories from L.A. That was the place to be.  And yeah, I had my phase of loving classic cars and listening to the Penguins and Brenton Wood and the Art Laboe show, broadcasting direct from L.A. I haven’t quite left it.

My memory of the riots comes from someone else, I’m not even sure of his name. It was a couple of years later and I was working for the summer at a pizza place right near the res when he started working there. He was real big, and all tatted up. Those tats right up the neck were still uncommon, so we were all curious and of course he came from L.A. because no one in Tucson looked like that yet. He didn’t talk much, I remember him being very quiet, and just going about his work. But one night over a break when no customers were in he did, just a little. A little about how he’d wanted to leave the life, and to get out he had to get out of L.A. too. So he’d come to stay with family and get a new start. And he said a little about the riots, the fires and the looting and the madness. He didn’t think it was cool at all, but even as he spoke about terrible things he had a matter-of-factness about him. We thought that was totally cool. I understand that thought better now, but back then when we listened to him, I’m pretty sure that everyone else was feeling just a little jealous like me that we had never experienced anything like that. L.A. was still the place to be in that world we were in.

It’s impossible really, to remember how you felt in the past because it tends to mix up with how you feel in the present, how you thought you felt or wanted to feel. I felt a mix of things, that was for sure, and mostly fear and disapproval, because I had already seen enough violence to hate it. But that’s not all. It took me a while I think to come to terms with just how angry I was about growing up poor, even though I loved so much of my childhood. It’s like I built up a reservoir from every time someone made fun of my clothes or talked down to me, from when I couldn’t have what other kids had, when mom had to deal with creditors on the phone, when I couldn’t go places with my friends, when we lost our house. So I found the anger a little understandable and exciting too. I might not remember much of what he said, but I remember that excitement.

It’s funny I ended up in L.A. after all that, not because I wanted to, but by pure chance. I remember my ex pointing out the corner where they had parked a tank in Echo Park. It took a while for L.A. to move from myth to reality in my head really, and now it means so much more to me, but these two themes remain: it is the pinnacle of a certain kind of West Coast cool I think, and it is violent. Now I know the great love and struggle that is there, the violence hurts all the more in spite of a deeper understanding not just of the anger but the underlying reasons for that anger.

The other outstanding memory from that pizza place, the worst workplace I’ve ever had by the way, was my friend Rachel playing this song on the jukebox on many a night after we had shut, her favorite song and a beautiful one to remember all those we have lost to places like L.A. and the anger and eruptions that they are capable of bringing to life:

(for Fundación Mi Sangre)

For the past month, I have had the privilege of traveling with a friend through Patagonia, a gorgeous region with scenery and colors that seem to stretch far beyond human understanding and imagination. The long rides and hikes through endless landscapes and blue skies have served the perfect backdrop to reflect on life and these changing times; on current crises and burgeoning movements like OWS; on the work that fellow friends and activists and I have been involved in over the past year to fight for jobs, public sector services and free education in London; on where we’re at, what we’ve accomplished and where we should be going…

ANGELA

These reflections have been nourished by Angela Davis’s totally badass autobiography, written at the very young age of 28, that I’ve had the pleasure to read along the way.

The book is a beautiful personal insight into a time when the struggle against racism in the African American community was at a boiling point (1960s-early 1970s) in as disparate places as the  Jim Crow South, the east and west coasts of America,  as well as in other parts of the world such as Germany and post-revolutionary Cuba.

Davis takes us back to Birmingham, Alabama, where the author is from, and depicts in vivid detail a time when segregation was alive and kicking and Black families ran the risk of having their houses blown up (on “Dynamite Hill”) for moving on the white side of the street. Her recollection of the brutal murder of 4 black girls in a church bombing in Birmingham in 1963 is gut wrenching and extremely powerful as she takes us beyond the now well-known historic headline to describe her friends robbed of their childhoods while trying to navigate a world hell-bent on destroying them and the budding uprising of Black people in the South. Ultimately, it is not, as Davis explains, a couple of “bomb-wielding racists” that were responsible for their deaths, but “the whole society [that] was guilty of this murder” [...] “the whole ruling stratum in their country, by being guilty of racism, was also guilty of this murder.”

Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable.

Great movies and novels tap into our dreams and help bring our deepest desires to the surface. Even not so great movies accomplish this task. They provide a break from reality and an entry into imagined worlds, often giving life to our most absurd and explicit fantasies. So why should Dr. Pop celebrate these avenues of escape? Is not delusion an enemy of transformation? Isn’t Dr. Pop all about helping people to face reality? And to actually do something to make it better?

The short answer is: Yes and No. We at Dr. Pop are 1000% committed to positive social transformation. There is no question about that. Yet we believe that in order to be 1000% committed to anything requires radically embracing our fantasies, our dreams, and our deepest desires. In fact, we believe that ethical illusions can be used to draw people closer to their actually existing surroundings. This means embracing storytelling and seeing fiction as more than just a form of weekend entertainment. It means creating and discovering ways to bring the world of fantasy into our political lives.

This is precisely what Stephen Ducombe calls for in his book Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. In the book, my latest favorite work, Ducombe challenges progressives to embrace spectacle as a way to manifest our ethics of fairness, justice, and equity. The ballot box, conventional protest, and enlightening panel will never be enough to transform our world, precisely because these political methods largely fail to tap into our dreams the ways that movies and novels so easily do. Instead, Ducombe argues, our politics must take on bolder and more fantastic forms. Our streets must be reclaimed, our stores must be occupied with song, and our imaginations must be channeled in ways that well-reasoned arguments will never achieve alone.

Among his key points, Ducombe claims that truth and power belong to those who tell the better story. To make his point he frequently points to the Bush administration which was able to maintain incredible power for eight years despite its obvious lies and deceptions. Yet what the Bush administration clearly understood is the need to entertain and to create spectacles that can be exploited for political ends. If these methods are bound to be used, the question then becomes – toward what ends?

Make no mistake, Ducombe is aware of the dangers of such fantastic methods and he cites Nazi Germany as a clear example of how political spectacles can facilitate real-life horror stories. Yet just because stories and spectacles have been used a vehicles for hateful destruction in the past is no reason to abandon such methods outright. Like Dr. Pop, Ducombe asserts that imaginative political acts can actually be filled with enlightened ethics and expressed in ways that expand democratic participation rather than augment dictatorship. For beautiful examples of these possibilities, look no further than Antonus Mockus, the former superhero mayor of Bogotá and unofficial muse of Dr. Pop.

What Mockus understands – and what all successful progressives must come to grasp – is that politics cannot be separated from human motivation, from the actions and events which speak to our inescapable irrationality and satisfy our emotional needs. And so we must learn how to mobilize human motivations in ways that increase transparency, expand social consciousness, and deepen participation. Only then can we expect to build a social movement whose events are deemed a better use of people’s time than NetFlix, Twilight, and Gossip Girl. Indeed, only then can we help people to find the courage to face reality by diving into the romance, honor, sacrifice and mystery of social change efforts.

In summary- Accomplishing goals as lofty as justice for all, means being comfortable with lofty methods. It means organizers becoming unafraid to don superhero capes, politicians daring to share fantastical visions, and everyday activists creating new, risky ways to shine light on the worlds around them. If you know of great examples of such courageous dreams in action, please share them through your comments below.

The main character, Troy, a tough girl with four rambunctious brothers, was and is someone I could relate to as she’s always trying stick up for herself both inside and outside the home. She also seems to be the one most aware of  the financial problems of her parents, who are constantly fighting about not making ends meet.

As a kid who didn’t know much about how folks live outside the city, one of the most interesting parts of the film is when Troy is sent to stay with family in the South. The South is a whole other world for Troy–structure, order, and definitely no stoop. When her aunt Song, criticizes the way her mother does her hair, Troy goes from having braids to getting her hair pressed for the first time. Her experience in the South becomes part of a major turning point for Troy as she soon finds out that her mother is ill and then must return to Brooklyn.  Troy then steps up as the matriarch, not realizing that she’s forcing herself to grow up without mourning her mother’s death.

Despite the hardships the children face–poverty, instability, the loss of a parent–Spike Lee manages to still remind us that while things although might not always be perfect, let alone easy, life in the city does not have to be tragic.