feeling turkish

The Betrayed offered a disconcerting glimpse of what Turkish national representatives and regular citizens alike know/believe/understand about the Armenian genocide. Has the state succeeded in historical erasure? How guilty/complicit are those who knew it was taking place but did nothing? How does this socio-cultural policy of denial make Turkey and Turkish people appear to rest of the world?

The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975 self-identifies not as the complete history of the black power movement, but of how the movement was observed and understood by two Swedish filmmakers.
By demonstrating the extent to which our country has intentionally crippled African Americans, The Black Power Mixtape is helpful in dispelling the narrator's (and as a result most viewers') naivete and assumptions of righteous innocence.

J. Edgar Hoover spearheaded the FBI's campaign of political genocide against the panther party and other radicals under auspices of COINTELPRO. In addition to murdering and locking up many of that generation's most prominent thinkers and leaders, the FBI also targeted non-violent social programs whose only subversive agenda was for black people in america to be healthy and survive. For example, The Black Panther Party's free breakfast program (for children mostly), was admitted to be considered the greatest threat to national security.

I think the Feds perceived the panthers as the vanguards of a broader, somewhat marxian struggle. As a result, they assassinated particularly threatening individuals, and threw figurative small-pox blankets to the  wider, low-income, black populous. First with heroin, then crack, our government divided and conquered some of its most vulnerable communities by establishing violent, underground economies. This is in the context of American deindustrialization, within which working/middle class Black people were being laid off across the country. Times have changed, but the federal government's treatment of African Americans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries resemble its treatment of indigenous Americans in earlier centuries. Think of projects as reservations/food-aid (controlling lifeways & forcing dependency); Cultural/spiritual violence vis a vis alcohol&disease/heroin&crack; death by murder.

Even with the 'proof' of government documents, many people perceive my words as bottom-shelf conspiracy theory. In this sense, I associate Americans and Turkish people: both countries have recent (or contemporary) histories of severe ethnic cleansing -- in each, those who acknowledge and study their state's behavior are marginal and relatively few. If you were weirded out by Turkish people's ignorance of the Armenian genocide and are unfamiliar with America's war(s) on people of color, I very seriously recommend The Black Power Mixtape.