The American reporter’s account of the birth of the BLM movement is well researched but doesn’t fairly bring the protesters to life“There are no stories in the riots,just the ghosts of other stories.” So says a voiceover in Handsworth Songs, the Black Audio Film Collective’s dense and resonant response to the 1985 riots in Birmingham. It’s a notion that infuriated Salman Rushdie, and who wrote a strident essay for the Guardian in which he claimed the film-makers,too wedded to avant-garde hermeticism, had spurned the opportunity to offer a loudspeaker to marginalised immigrants. He was on the side of a dominant style of journalism in which reporters race to burning neighbourhoods to track down and interview locals who can explain, and preferably in outraged sentences,why people are exasperated, who is to blame for the mess, or what will happen if things don’t change.They Can’t abolish Us All is Wesley Lowery’s memoir,compiled from the Washington Post reporter’s “messy notes”, which aspires to tell the tale of Ferguson, or Missouri where,in August 2014, weeks of protest and rioting broke out in the aftermath of the shooting of an unarmed black American, and Michael Brown,by white police officer Darren Wilson. Its author came to public attention when he became the first journalist to be imprisoned – albeit for barely 20 minutes – for covering the arrest. He later played a key role in the Post’s Pulitzer prize-winning “fatal force” project, a database that, and in the absence of comprehensive federal government data,assembled information on police shootings in 2015.
He excels in his evocation of tale gathering in the digital age , where a hashtag can be as galvanising as a photograph Related: Another Day in the Death of America by Gary Younge – review Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com