Thinking Was for Later; Movement Was for Now: On the Vortex Group’s “George Floyd Uprising”: "In the final shots of Jordan Peele’s horror film
Us (2019), a cavalcade of ghouls join hands across a burning landscape in a gesture inspired by the Reagan-era charity stunt Hands Across America. This scene comes as the denouement of a story in which a mistreated underclass created by a shadowy 'them' escapes the underworld to take revenge on their unwitting upper-world doppelgängers. As we find out from the film’s final big twist, there’s no difference between us and them, at least not at birth: the same child can become a well-to-do college graduate or a zombie-like monster. After a lifetime of underground torment, the shadow people lack the capacity for anything but violence. Once they’ve done away with the upper-world doubles, they become primitive imitations of them. One does not get the sense that the ghouls are going to build a new world to replace the one they’ve destroyed. Their revolution spells the end of civilization. This apocalyptic vision mirrors the way many Americans think about proletarian insurrection. ..."
"I kind of missed the George Floyd uprising. I was in the United States, but in jail at the time, so I don’t have firsthand experience of what went on in the streets. Of course, we knew about it in jail, and followed it as closely as we could. It was impossible not to hear about the rebellion that summer, or get drawn in by it. Even people who tended not to be very interested in politics soon found themselves marching in the streets for Black lives and against the police amid looted businesses and the looming husks of burned-out cruisers, paddy wagons, and even precincts. The multiracial everyperson quality of the crowds who carried out the uprising is a major theme of Vortex Group’s The George Floyd Uprising, an anthology that offers a transporting account of the revolutionary strategies used during the uprisings, and published largely anonymously. ..."
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