Article: "American Blackout" - a documentary by Ian Inaba

I was talking with my daughter today about how depressing I find it that we seem to be making such little progress in the area of race relations. I said that our nation has been indelibly scarred by the institution of slavery. She objected to the word "indelibly," which implies that nothing can be done about it, now or in the future. She said that framing the issue that way makes it impossible to envision victory. Even if we are engaged in the fight because it is the right thing to do, we must believe that victory is possible at some point. So, I will reframe my take on how slavery has affected all of us, whether we lived in those days or not. I will say that it has left a large stain on the American psyche that we must work very hard to overcome.

The theme of water is a strong one in this film and in black American history. There are the newsreel fire hoses mercilessly sprayed on blacks to keep them from exercising the right to vote. There is also the constant rain that drenched the black voters in Ohio, who were forced to stand in line for hours due to inadequate and often malfunctioning machines. All of this water, especially the rain, reminded me of tears.

When I watch or read stories about the black American experience, I get so overwhelmed by the unfairness of it all. For so many of us, blacks and whites really do operate in two different worlds. I can comfortably live in suburbia without ever encountering the issues confronting my black fellow Americans. And yet, we are all damaged by a system that dishonors and excludes some of our citizens. If something as simple as "one person, one vote" has no grounding in reality, what kind of a democracy do we live in?

The film's opener – a rap-style poem "True Lies" by Taalam Avey, is full of wisdom about "The new, new world order where electronic voting machine companies get to help us decide, that way you get to win the election and still lose. That's why African-Americans have to be disenfranchised..." shows me that this is one dude who gets it.

A voice at the beginning of the film talks about the value of the black vote in close elections, when a tightly knit voting block can determine the outcome. As a result, one party has chosen to court those voters, as borne out by numerous shots of candidates posing with black constituents. Implicit in the rest of the film is the way the other party has chosen to neutralize that voting block, not confident that they could win them over – hence the various techniques to silence the black voice by negating the black vote. One man, who upon going to vote was told that his name was removed from the list because he was a convicted felon (which he was not), testified that he felt like he had been "slingshotted into slavery."

On again-off again Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney is featured in this film. Palast says that the way she was treated by the media and her political foes was like the proverbial corpse thrown over the wall as a warning to anyone considering departing from the party line. So much (virtually all) of what I know about McKinney has been colored by the press's slant, and this film made me feel like I should go back and try to figure out what is really true and what is propaganda. McKinney was one of the first to vocally oppose the war in Iraq and raise questions about 9/11. Her criticisms were not welcomed, and she was viewed as a trouble-maker and a thorn in the side of an Administration that enjoyed tremendously high ratings post-9/11. She was lambasted and ridiculed by the right-wing media, who deliberately misquoted her and branded her as a conspiracy theorist loony. Palast sees this as the modern equivalent of lynching. The progressive media, sadly, did not step forward in her defense and in many cases, joined in the chorus. Her congressional seat was targeted by the National Republican Party, which twice used controversial cross-over voting in the primaries to defeat her. While the country has come around to agree with her view about the wrongness of the war, many are still not willing to hear it from her.

Towards the end of the film, Palast asks rhetorically "Where is the outrage?" He says, unfortunately, that we would rather hold onto the myth of democracy than fight for its reality. What we get, then, is virtual apartheid in our elections, media, and separate but grossly unequal lives. We really are two Americas and we are very much the poorer for it, whether we are aware of it or not.

American Blackout is a welcome and important addition to the library of films on recent elections. It takes a different tack, offering us a closer glimpse of the black community and providing another important piece of the puzzle. I'm sorry that it's taken me so long to get to this review. I got a copy of the film when I was at the People Count 2006 conference in Cleveland last fall. I promised Ian Inaba that I would do a review, and am now belatedly honoring my promise. Luckily, he hasn't been sitting around waiting impatiently for me to get my act together. American Blackout won a special jury award at the 2006 Sundance film festival and a host of other awards at other festivals as well.

At the end of the film, various anonymous black faces speak up and claim that they are not giving up. The copy across the last frame of the film reads, "It's up to you to end the blackout." And, so it is. Visit http://www.AMERICANBLACKOUT.org to find out what you can do to help restore democracy so that all eligible voters are able to vote and each vote is fairly and honestly counted.

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