If you guessed “unquestionably accepting the police’s narrative”, you win!
The responses are as expected. Most city subs are pretty awful
In authoritarian China the police bomb whole neighborhoods
I have a pile of artistic responses to the MOVE bombing that I’ve been meaning to go through. Might make for an interesting essay or some such, but if someone else wants to explore the topic or beat me to the essay, here’s what I’ve been looking at:
Narrative film: The Inheritance
After nearly a decade exploring different facets of the African diaspora — and his own place within it — Ephraim Asili makes his feature-length debut with The Inheritance, an astonishing ensemble work set almost entirely within a West Philadelphia house where a community of young, Black artists and activists form a collective. A scripted drama of characters attempting to work towards political consensus — based partly on Asili’s own experiences in a Black liberationist group — weaves with a documentary recollection of the Philadelphia liberation group MOVE, the victim of a notorious police bombing in 1985. Ceaselessly finding commonalties between politics, humor, and philosophy, with Black authors and radicals at its edges, The Inheritance is a remarkable film about the world as we know it.
Documentary film: Black and Blue and The Bombing of Osage Ave.
A powerful mix of archival material, news clips and documentary footage chronicles impassioned community response to decades of deadly force against people of color by members of the Philadelphia police force. Community leaders, politicians, police officers, survivors of police brutality and sympathizers unravel a pattern of biased violent police behavior from the tenure of Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo to the bombing of Osage Avenue. This documentary is a testimony to long-standing tensions between police and people of color in communities throughout the United States.
Novel: Philadelphia Fire
One of John Wideman’s most ambitious and celebrated works, the lyrical masterpiece and PEN/Faulkner winner inspired by the 1985 police bombing of the West Philadelphia row house owned by black liberation group Move.
In 1985, police bombed a West Philadelphia row house owned by the Afrocentric cult known as Move, killing eleven people and starting a fire that destroyed sixty other houses. At the heart of Philadelphia Fire is Cudjoe, a writer and exile who returns to his old neighborhood after spending a decade fleeing from his past, and who becomes obsessed with the search for a lone survivor of the event: a young boy seen running from the flames.
Award-winning author John Edgar Wideman brings these events and their repercussions to shocking life in this seminal novel. “Reminiscent of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man” (Time) and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, Philadelphia Fire is a masterful, culturally significant work that takes on a major historical event and takes us on a brutally honest journey through the despair and horror of life in urban America.
Philly chuds are the scum of the earth
How is it that there are so many chuds within city limits? Usually, chuds stay outside of the city except for sports games. Is it because the PPD, until recently, required residency, creating that police enclave in northeast Philly?
There aren’t; racists from delco and bucks county come to concern troll about crime and Krasner. Any post about a crime or anything somewhat progressive politically gets a lot more comments than normal posts. Maybe some of them lived in Philly at some point but it gets mentioned a lot in certain threads that a lot of commenters in the Philly sub aren’t residents
