Blindspotting opens with a split-screen montage. On the left is the Oakland of the Black Panthers, Oscar Grant, and 101 resistance-themed murals; on the right is the Whole Foods just two blocks from Lake Merritt. Three days before Diggs’ Collin is to complete his yearlong parole, he witnesses from the driver’s seat of his employer’s moving truck a white cop shooting a fleeing black man several times in the back. Reporting the crime feels impossible: “Hello, police? I’d like to report a murder you did.” While the case becomes a cause célèbre, Collin focuses on getting his life back together. But how do you plan for a future in a city you can’t afford, where the benefits of “progress” mostly accrue to those who least need them?
Collin and his best friend Miles (Casal) wonder at the Oakland that their hometown has become: a new Portland, filled with green juices, vegan burgers, and tall bikes. (The pals work together as movers, staying afloat financially, at least for the time being, by working for their potential supplanters.) Collin is cautious and amiable, in part because he has to be. He’s a tall, muscled black man in braids who’ll do anything to avoid being sent back to jail. As a tatted, begrilled white guy, Miles has the luxury of making himself be seen, though he’s just a tight T-shirt away from being mistaken for a transplant—a word he can’t say without twisting his face in disgust. While Collin scouts for opportunities where he can adapt to the new Oakland, Miles simmers in his feelings of rage and besiegement until they can’t be contained. (In a showier role, Casal, who resembles a knocked-around Timothy Olyphant, steals the picture from the Tony-winning Diggs, best known as an original cast member of Hamilton.)
Blindspotting’s central mysteries—why Collin went to jail, and why Miles loathes his bud’s ex-girlfriend Val (Janina Gavankar)—eventually unfold exactly as they should, unearthing the mutual resentments between the two friends that they’d kept buried for the sake of their friendship. When the two men finally contend with the hornet’s nest between them that they’d ignored for years, a masterful scene ensues in which the writers address the spikiness of race and masculinity as well as how inadequate our language can be in discussing those issues. But the pacing feels loose and sags as the drama trots toward its very last confrontation. That’s a disservice to the killer-cop storyline, which feels forgotten for much of the film’s running time and finally resolves with an eye toward ideological neatness, rather than the honest complications that make the rest of the film so forceful.
Still, the dual portrait that Blindspotting offers is heady and dense and mighty compelling. Miles can only see the Oakland of before and the Oakland to come, but for Collin, the city’s past and future aren’t different enough. The survival of their friendship depends on whether they can adjust their perspectives to see what the other sees.
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A record-breaking artist has created a new sculpture that pays tribute to the lawyers who, in 1925, founded the oldest and largest network of black attorneys and judges in America The Guardian: Kerry James Marshall: unveiling his pivotal black history monument
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A Monumental Journey, the Kerry James Marshall sculpture that was unveiled on 12 July in Des Moines, Iowa, is a behemoth. Standing 30ft tall, it comprises two tapered cylindrical volumes, minimalist abstractions of west African talking drums rendered in black manganese brick. They’ve been stacked askew, one on top of the other, and encircled with an inscription of 12 names. They’re the lawyers who, in 1925, founded the National Bar Association, the oldest and largest network of African American attorneys and judges in the country.
“This monument, the stature of it, the sense of strength and vitality and the legacy it’s built on is very humbling,” says the NBA president, Juan Thomas. It commemorates 12 attorneys, including Gertrude E Durden Rush, the second woman to ever practice law in Iowa, who had lived through a time when being “an African American lawyer was a very lonely place”: there were fewer than 1,000 of them nationwide, with zero black members of Congress and a growing Ku Klux Klan that would peak that year at 50,000 members. At the height of the Jim Crow era, having been denied membership to the American Bar Association, they decided to organize their own.
Working adjacent to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NBA became a vehicle for civil rights advocacy through legal action. Its members, now numbering more than 65,000 across North America, Latin America and Africa, provided counsel to people and other organizations of color. Their efforts helped to block John J Parker, a known opponent to black voting rights, from a seat at the supreme court. They stayed executions, they opened black businesses, and they built a network of support that had previously not existed.
The NBA’s work against the structural exclusions resonates with Marshall’s practice, sewn into what he describes as “a certain ambition to participate fully in the narrative of the making of history”. Now based in Chicago, he was born in Alabama in 1955 and raised in South Central Los Angeles – two historic sites of violent racial tension that consequently infused a sense of social responsibility into his work. His ambitions were pointed squarely at making art history, and correcting the conspicuous absence of black figures in textbooks in museums.
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Thirty years ago, Margaret Kuya made a costly investment that she hoped would pay off for her newborn daughter: She bought herself a better job.
“To get a job in Kenya, it is not about being smart or hard-working. We say, ‘You have to know someone,’ ” Kuya said recently at her home in Nairobi. Her family is by no means wealthy or well-connected, but back then, she knew someone who knew someone else. She gave most of her meager savings to a middleman and went from being a maid to cooking in a school cafeteria — one small rung up on society’s ladder.
On the eve of her retirement from that job, Kuya makes about $200 a month. Diana Kuya, her daughter, is now almost 30. Margaret has paid out thousands of dollars — years’ worth of scrupulously saved paychecks — to try to secure Diana a job that’s at least one rung higher on the ladder.
But those dreams have been stolen. Each middleman has run away with her money. Diana is an unpaid intern, one of hundreds of thousands of educated young Kenyans without jobs.
A sense that pervasive corruption is stifling young Kenyans’ futures has been building for years, like pressure in a sealed, heated chamber. And Kenya’s leaders — themselves long accused of corruption — seem finally to have recognized the potential political cost of not addressing it.
In recent weeks, Kenya’s president and deputy president have offered to be among the first subjects of a “lifestyle audit” — an anti-graft initiative that, if implemented, would require all government officials to show how they earned enough to afford the mansions, ranches and luxury cars so many of them own. Only if corruption is weeded out at the top, the thinking goes, will it be possible to end the kind of petty corruption faced by the Kuyas.
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Nkechi John, 39, lives in a single room with her four children and husband, who is a welder. Their daily lives are fairly typical of people in poverty in Nigeria, which according to the Brookings Institution now has the world’s greatest number of extreme poor.
“Life is tough and everybody is complaining,” she says. “I used to sell akara [bean cake]. I could make around 1,000-1,200 naira [£2-£2.50] profit every day, but now I can’t even make 400 naira. People don’t have money to buy it because there are no jobs.
“Most of my customers are bricklayers, plumbers, electricians. I couldn’t even sell all of the cake I made today to make up to 400 naira.
“I am tired of life,” she says, adding she can believe poverty is now worse than in India. “The suffering’s too much. The president and government need to do something before we all die.
“I try to do some farming, but there is no money to buy fertiliser and the crops have all turned yellow due to the lack of it. And only two of our school-age kids are in school because we can’t afford it.”
Uche Joseph Uwaleke, an economist at Nasarawa State University in Nigeria’s central region, explains why there has been an increase in extreme poverty. “There is the issue of insecurity in the north-east. Although the Boko Haram violence has been reduced to a manageable level, local farmers in that region are still afraid of going to farms.
“Despite the end of the recession, manufacturing, the transportation sector and agriculture have still not recovered.”
He also blames poor governance. “The late approval and poor implementation of the budget is another reason for the growing poverty. All of this affects jobs.”
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