Trailer: 'The Interrupters'--Full Frame Special Jury Award Winner

The Interrupters: A Film by Steve James & Alex Kotlowitz

The Interrupters tells the moving and surprising stories of three Violence Interrupters who try to protect their Chicago communities from the violence they once employed. From acclaimed director Steve James and bestselling author Alex Kotlowitz, this film is an unusually intimate journey into the stubborn persistence of violence in our cities. Shot over the course of a year out of Kartemquin Films, The Interrupters captures a period in Chicago when it became a national symbol for the violence in our cities. During that period, the city was besieged by high-profile incidents, most notably the brutal beating of Derrion Albert, a Chicago High School student, whose death was caught on videotape.

The film’s main subjects work for an innovative organization, CeaseFire, which believes that the spread of violence mimics the spread of infectious diseases, and so the treatment should be similar: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source. The singular mission of the “Violence Interrupters” — who have credibility on the streets because of their own personal histories — is to intervene in conflicts before they explode into violence.

In The Interrupters, Ameena Matthews, whose father is Jeff Fort, one of the city’s most notorious gang leaders, was herself a drug ring enforcer. But having children and finding solace in her Muslim faith pulled her off the streets and grounded her. In the wake of Derrion Albert’s death, Ameena becomes a close confidante to his mother, and helps her through her grieving. Ameena, who is known among her colleagues for her fearlessness, befriends a feisty teenaged girl who reminds her of herself at that age. The film follows that friendship over the course of many months, as Ameena tries to nudge the troubled girl in the right direction.

Cobe Williams, scarred by his father’s murder, was in and out of prison, until he had had enough. His family – particularly a young son – helped him find his footing. Cobe disarms others with his humor and his general good nature. His most challenging moment comes when he has to confront a man so bent on revenge that Cobe has to pat him down to make sure he’s put away his gun. Like Ameena, he gets deeply involved in the lives of those he encounters, including a teenaged boy just out of prison and a young man from his old neighborhood who’s squatting in a foreclosed home.

Eddie Bocanegra is haunted by a murder he committed when he was seventeen. His CeaseFire work is a part of his repentance for what he did. Eddie is most deeply disturbed by the aftereffects of the violence on children, and so he spends much of his time working with younger kids in an effort to both keep them off the streets and to get support to those who need it – including a 16-year-old girl whose brother died in her arms. Soulful and empathic, Eddie, who learned to paint in prison, teaches art to children, trying to warn them of the debilitating trauma experienced by those touched by the violence.

The Interrupters follows Ameena, Cobe and Eddie as they go about their work, and while doing so reveals their own inspired journeys of hope and redemption. The film attempts to make sense of what CeaseFire’s Tio Hardiman calls, simply, “the madness”.

Make In Plain: Reading Nas’s Letter to ‘Young Warriors’

special to NewBlackMan

Make In Plain: Reading Nas’s Letter to ‘Young Warriors’
by David Ikard

So rapper Nas wrote an open letter to black male teens that condemned the senseless killing of honors student Derrion Albert and issued a plea to young black men to stop taking their social frustrations out on each other. He writes passionately:

“Killing each other is definitely played out. Being hurt from the lost of a love one was never cool. Dear Young Warriors fighting the wrong war! I know that feeling, that frustration with life and needing to take it out on someone, any one. But we chose the dumbest things to go the hardest for. I remember seeing deaths over 8 ball jackets, Filas, and name plate chains. Deaths over ‘he say she say’!!!!! ‘I’m from this block or I’m from that block”, or ‘my moms n pops is f***ed up now the whole world gotta pay!!!”

Even though Nas’s words hit home for a great many black and brown folks that are forced to contend with such violence on the daily—either from each other or the criminal justice system—there were several feminist groups that were quick to indict his gesture. Referring to Nas as a “washed up” and “sorry azz” rapper, blogger Sandra Rose refused to post his open letter on her blog, writing

“Here’s a man (and I use the term loosely) whose violent lyrics helped contribute to the environment that bred the wild children who opened up another child’s head with sticks and laughed while doing it.”

On the politically progressive website whataboutourdaughters.com—whose expressed raison d'etre is “to use economic power to impose economic sanctions on those who are producing destructive images of black women and girls”—the acid attacks on Nas continue. Zeroing in the Nas’s reference to young black men as “warriors,” one blogger writes, “Let’s call these people what they are URBAN TERRORISTS! Their war is against US—innocent black civilians trying to make our way in the world the best way we know how.” The terms “savage” and “savagery” emerged time and again as references to these young urban black men on other blog entries. This is not to say that there weren’t other blogs that avoided such jabs because there were. The most insightful engaged our nation’s preoccupation with thug images of black masculinity, a preoccupation that works directly to undermine the presence and productivity of honor students such as Albert.

I focus here more on the acidic ones because as a black man invested in progressive antisexist, antiracist, anti-capitalistic models of empower, I don’t see how these gendered attacks against Nas and young urban black men help us initiate the kinds of substantive dialogue about hyper-black masculinity and culturally sanctioned violence against black women that we advocate.

There is no debating that Nas’ patriarchal rhetoric reinforces the hyper-black masculinity discourse that is partly to blame for why these young men acted out in the vicious ways that they did. But, he clearly does not see that. Even though he does not possess the critical and historical frameworks to fully understand his complicity in the status quo, he clearly knows that something about the ways that black men are thinking about their manhood and expressing their anger is wrongheaded. He also knows—and is indeed trying to fend off with his references to this young men as “warriors”—that the tendency in the public domain is for our nation to write these boys off as “savages,” “thugs,” “urban terrorists,” and the like.

However impolitic is his expression of concern, Nas is rightly trying to refocus the debate on the patterns of structural inequality that encourage such black-on-black violence. Rather than attack the brotha’s language and shortsighted patriarchal politics, we should reach out to him. Send him what Mark Anthony Neal’s calls a “black feminist care package,” including books by scholar-activists like Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, Patricia Hill-Collins, Michael Awkward, Nellie McKay, Mark Anthony Neal, and Joan Morgan. We should think of this intervention as—dare I say—a “teaching moment” for Nas and the male-centric black communities.

And, since good teaching is always a two-way street, we should also remain open to what we can learn from Nas and those brothas and sistas that come out of these environments. Indeed, street literacy in the form of understanding how black masculinity is performed and read in certain ‘hoods can be a matter of life and death. However productive and smart we might think our theories for resolving these problems are, if they are divorced materially from the realities on the ground, then they are essentially bankrupt. If someone is hungry, she is more likely to hear and appreciate your theories about resolving her hunger after you address the most pressing concern and give her something to eat. No matter how smart or useful is your theory for resolving hunger, if you skip this vital step, you lose the interest—and perhaps even the respect—of your audience.

Suffice it to say, that if our goal is to reach out and help transform our communities on issues of gender and violence, then its high time that we start “keeping it real” about the limitations of our vantage points and theories. To riff on Mohandas Gandhi’s poignant words, “we have to become the change we want to see” in black communities.

***

DAVID IKARD, Assistant Professor, Ph.D, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2002), specializes in twentieth century literature (with a specialty in African American), black feminist criticism, hip hop culture, and black masculinity studies. In 2007, he published his first book, Breaking The Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism and was also awarded a Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship. His current book length project reconsiders rigid identity-focused approaches to African American Literature with an eye towards developing expansive critical models of black humanity.

Blood in Our Streets

special to NewBlackMan

Nothing but a ‘G Thang?: Blood in Our Streets
by Stephane Dunn

I nicknamed him Psycho because he reminded of a young guy whose actual street name was Psycho. Actually, he reminded me of a thousand such young black men. Psycho and I met one evening as I sat on the front porch step of a friend’s store on the fringes of the projects. I was on a rare return trip home to little Elkhart, IN and an old high school friend was filling me in – a long list of who was in jail, on the way to jail, newly released from jail, strung out, selling drugs, and dead. Psycho wandered by for a hair net. He rocked several gold chains around his neck, but otherwise he looked, at twenty-five, almost school boyish in neat cornrows, a white t-shirt with Tupac on the front, and black jeans that didn’t quite sag so much they’d fall down without the blinged out belt he wore.

Somehow we got to talking –Tupac, music and Psycho’s life. He had a beautiful three year old daughter and an estranged girlfriend-baby mama whom he’d struck more than once. I questioned him about his daughter; would it be okay if some day a man hit her because she didn’t obey him or she took his car keys or mouthed off at him? He looked at me, black eyes deadly earnest, ’I’d kill that nigga’. No question.’ He was out there – as we like to say- living that thug life, a drug dealer extraordinaire with high plans for life after he left the game. He was going to do real estate, maybe open a barber shop, or another store, invest . . . I asked him again and again when ‘after’ was going to come. Soon he kept saying, soon.

We talked into the evening, the warm summer evening fading into late night; he ignored his beeper and both of us barely noticed the cars slow crawling by with the pumped up wheels and the Psycho looking imitators honking and hollering out. We were old friends by the time we hugged goodbye and I said to him last, Don’t stay out there too long. I don’t want to hear about you getting killed or going to prison.’ Nine months later Psycho was shot to death trying to flee his killers--three other young black men. They murdered him on the steps of his apartment building practically in front of his new girlfriend and their child, whom thank God the killers spared.

Right now, in Chicago, the murder of a sixteen year old honor student by three other young black men is making headline news. Usually, it doesn’t though it happens every day in small towns like Elkhart and big cities like Chicago. Despite it being an epidemic, we remain in denial, the proof of which lies in the distorted language used to characterize the perpetrators. The words ‘gang’ and ‘gang violence’ like ‘thugs’ are thrown around a lot so much so that they are merely vague euphemisms for something we want to believe can be chalked up to wayward, ‘bad’ ‘black’ and violent seeds and familiar violent groups (gangs) on the margins of society and our communities.

The only answer has been, as one CNN reporter echoed, to lock them up if they can be discovered especially when they dare kill other ‘respectable’ young people like the sixteen year old Chicagoan. Perhaps it’s too difficult to confront that we are up against a cultural psyche, a consciousness that has a generation of children bred to disvalue life – their own and others and to see going to court and prison as a rite of passage. Unfortunately, this nihilistic worldview does not just belong to some anonymous mass of gang members. The ‘thugs’ come from families with grandmas and aunts and folks whose hearts will break when they see that mug shot on the news. Too many are potentially productive young people who give in to the thug life so prevalent around them. Given the numbers of young folk in prisons across the nation, it’s clear that locking them up is merely the only resolution we’ve got, not the one that’s preventing others from going or staying out and it is not, obviously, keeping the blood from running in the streets of the President’s adopted city or my hometown.

***

Stephane Dunn, Ph.D, MFA, is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Morehouse College. She has also taught at Ohio State University. A scholarly and creative writer, she specializes in film, popular culture, literature and African American studies. She is the author of articles and commentaries and the book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (University of Illinois Press 2008).