Wednesday, December 10, 2014

I can't breathe

The greatest responsibility always rests with the most powerful.

My Facebook feed is still stuffed with pro and anti Ferguson posts.

I have friends who see this as entitlement from the African American Community and emblematic of the moral decay of society when someone who is breaking the law is a victim and someone enforcing the law is a criminal.

I have friends who see this as emblematic of a deep and abiding class divide between black and white in America. More to the point they see this as the front line of the race wars where being black and male puts a target between your eyes for every cop in the US.

Me? I remember my gig on Bed Stuy Avenue in the 80's. I was one of the Scenics who worked on Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing".


 Yep, that would be a sign I painted for the film...  because I can do "homemade lettering" really well.


Here's the mural that Larry Casey painted.

The Pizza place and the mural which Joyce Kubalak painted.

(I got to "touch up" the pizza parlor after it burned- should have brought waders.)

There were two incidents which I will always remember.



The Scenics were the only all white crew. We were mostly white females. The reason for this was that there were no Scenic Artists of color in USA 829 available. I think we may have had one African American with a Scenic Artist card at that time. You got into the Union by passing a painting test. The test was judged "blind" so no one knew the candidates. That's the only reason women got in- we could paint. There was no"outreach" to minorities in the 80's and on Bedford-Stuyvesant Avenue that summer it became glaringly obvious.

Our on set security was provided by the Nation of Islam. They picked us up in a van every morning drove us to the block and then drove us back at the end of work every day. They were the only people in suits on the set. They were always impeccably dressed with crisp white shirts, narrow black ties and grey suits with knife edge pants creases.

Incident #1

Two of us were walking back to our "paint shop" in a brownstone basement when a gray van pulled up beside us. There was a white man driving and we could see that the back was caged in. The driver leaned over and said "You're doing  some construction here? You need security? Who's the boss? I need to talk to your boss." We heard whining from the caged section of the van. We were puzzled, but the Brothers knew what this was about. Neither one of us had time to answer before one of the Brothers started walking down the sidewalk towards us. The driver spotted the Brother and his look changed from obsequiousness to dread. He slammed his foot on the gas and the van tires screeched as he pulled away. The last we saw of him was the back doors of the caged van with several german shepherds looking out the windows.

These were "white dogs"


Dogs who had been trained to attack anyone of color.

Incident #2

If you saw the movie you remember the Pizza Parlor and the Bodega. We built those. They looked like real shops but they were just plywood fronts with a lot of paint and set dressing. I was working on the bodega set one day, I think I was working on the signage which advertised fruits and vegetables. 



One of the residents of the block stopped in his tracks and asked "Are you really putting up a store here?" I replied that no, this was a movie set and we would be filming and then it would be demolished and it would be just like it was before.

His face fell. I could see tears welling up in the corners of his eyes. "…but … but… if it's so easy why don't you do it everywhere?" 

Why don't we? It's not a matter of wealth, it's a matter of will. We're afraid of each other, we don't trust each other, our lizard brains take over. "Can't we all just get along?"

The bottom line is that whenever you have separated people into powerful and powerless there will be violence. 






 or we could make it even simpler….





No, I don't support criminal activity but I do understand frustration and hopelessness. I don't support enforcing laws only on the powerless and not on the powerful.  We can do better. We can let each other breathe.

and a 2020 addendum:










2 comments:

Lee Mulcahy said...

Brilliant post. Thank you. BTW, did you know workers at Telluride are voting on a union? Telski management has brought out the dirty tricks campaign.

Ziska said...

Lee,

Dirty tricks are non-denominational. It's that "right to work" thing which makes it almost impossible to create a Union in the home of Mother Jones.

The key to everything is a living wage and it doesn't stop at any border.

JMO.