Front Page > Issues > 2003 > February

A second look: open letter to Michael Moore

Dear Mike, so life is hard right now. And as two politically active people of color, it is exceptionally hard right now. Increased repression here at home, imminent war overseas, racial profiling institutionalized: we needed a break, and what better way to relax than with the insightful and political wit of Michael Moore?
So we bought our tickets to see “Bowling for Columbine,” your newest movie, which uses the school shooting at Columbine High School to examine why there is so much violence in the u.s.

Over the two hours or so of your movie, however, our excitement grew to disbelief, which quickly faded to disillusionment, hurt, anger, betrayal and rage. What began as a fun evening out ended with a political debriefing that lasted longer than the movie.

We mean, it seemed like such a good idea: amerika is horribly violent, and the school shooting by white kids has to be coming from somewhere. With your understanding of globalization, corporate capital, the military industry, as well as your hard-hitting investigation and your creative film-making style, we thought you might just be the guy to link up the fear running rampant in this country with its global empire and bring it back home, especially for the white folks who are blaming Marilyn Manson and video games and wondering where those parents went wrong.

But you left out one pesky little thing, Mike: Racism. You can’t talk about fear in this country without really discussing race and how it is viewed in this country. And that means more than just showing clips from the show Cops, and talking to some white dude who wrote a book about The Culture of Fear, okay?

When talking about violence and fear, the two of us immediately think deportations, detentions, police brutality, sexual assault, racial profiling, the prison industrial complex. But these were never really mentioned in the film. If you are talking about violence in amerika, how can you not mention the names Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima, two black victims of police brutality? Why did the film not mention the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, the thousands of incidents of hate violence against Middle Eastern/Muslim/Arab/South and Central Asian people post 911? Why didn’t you talk about the many women of color who are sexually assaulted and the large numbers of homeless queer youth of color? Why didn’t you talk about women and violence AT ALL in the movie???

One really important point you made in the movie is the connection between the violence here in this country and the violence amerika perpetuates against other nations. When talking about Columbine, you show how Lockheed Martin is building missiles just a few miles from there, and how these kids see their parents go to work every day building weapons of mass destruction, and how this must impact their psyches. That was good, Mike, that was real good!

You showed a culture of intimidation and a society built on violent repression as the backdrop for these so-called senseless killings coming out of nowhere. You looked at the U.S military’s actions in other countries and tied it to individual acts of violence in this country, more specifically acts committed by white youth. But the problem is, you didn’t mention the fact that the vast majority of those nations are filled with brown people, and that race very much plays into who this country attacks and why.

Without an analysis of how racism plays into amerikan imperialism, both overseas and in the u.s., we can never understand this culture around us.
You can’t talk about u.s. military intervention in Iraq without talking about the white supremacy amerika operates under that makes it okay to murder over half a million Iraqi children and get at some oil. You can’t discuss the u.s.-backed assassination and overthrow of the democratically elected Allende government in Chile without talking about the racist assumptions many amerikans have about Latino people’s ability to run a country.

And you didn’t allow people of color to speak for themselves either, Mike, which was one of the most hurtful and angering things. It’s like, did you go to the head of GM and ask him how his employees feel working on the assembly line? Hell no! But you allowed the white district attorney to talk about the criminalization of blackness. Even if he was making good points (which surprisingly he was) he’s still the white district attorney and he needs to be held responsible for that, not made out to be the expert on racism.

Mike, there are only four brown people who are allowed to even speak in your movie: two saying how much they like Canada, one saying briefly that he works 12 hour days, and one black woman principal crying on your shoulder when she tells you a story of a school shooting. C’mon now, you don’t think we have any “experts” about racism and racial profiling and criminalization?

Shit, you don’t think all of us are experts on that??

If you had just been honest about your limitations, we think it would have been more acceptable. If you had said, “Hey, I’m from a working class white background, and I’m going to do a movie about how working class white people are affected by the culture of fear and violence in this country,” that would have made the movie better. Not perfect, but better. You still have to address how racist many white people’s fears about violence are. You never addressed the racism behind the fact that the nation can mourn over the loss of lives at Columbine but not the loss of lives through police brutality, the loss in living through welfare to work programs, because violence is not only measured through death.

But the way your movie stands now, Mike, there is the kind of talk about racism (like having the white DA talk about us) that allows white liberals to leave the theater not having to think about what kind of power they have in amerika and feeling like the issues have been addressed. When you and the white dude who wrote The Culture of Fear stand in the middle of South Central, LA and talk about how safe you as two white men feel, it does more to placate the fears of white suburbia then actually talk about the racism embedded in the way South Central LA is talked about and represented, much less the institutionalized racism that keeps that neighborhood impoverished and decimated economically.

You didn’t include our issues, our concerns, our lived experiences in any meaningful in-depth way, and in doing so, you have only perpetuated the eurocentric way of talking about every damn thing and normalizing white people’s experience. For christ’s sake, Mike, you talked about “our amerikan fears” of another terrorist attack. Maybe that’s white amerika’s fears, but the two of us are more scared the cops are going to beat our asses on the New Jersey Turnpike, or that our loved ones will be made to disappear by the INS one night, or the FBI breaks down our door accusing us of being “terrorists” because of our brown skin. We’ve been living in “terror” for a long time, Mike, a long time.

So, we want to take this opportunity to issue a little challenge to you, Michael Moore, from us. We ask that, just as you have asked others to make amends for their mistakes, you do the same. We would like you to attend a dismantling racism workshop (not a tolerating diversity workshop, which is very, very different) to talk about the ways that white privilege plays out in all aspects of our lives, especially those of us who have access to capital to make movies that reach the big screen. We also ask that you take money from your new movie “Bowling for Columbine,” and create a fund for young progressive film-makers of color to be able to create films that address how violence affects people of color in this society.

We have faith that you want to be a good ally, Michael, so we ask that you do that by speaking about issues you know about and how they affect white working class people, ‘cause those are the folks who have to truly be educated about racism and how it supports all of our oppression. As for us folks of color, damn, Mike, just give us a camera, and let us speak for ourselves!

Priyanka Jindal is a queer desi doing multiracial youth organizing in South Philly. Walidah Imarisha is part of AWOL Magazine, the spoken word duo Good Sista/Bad Sista, and former board member for The Portland Alliance.