The story of the deterioration of Motor City and the most innovative people who refuse to let it burn to the ground.

Detroit's story has encapsulated the iconic narrative of America over the last century— the Great Migration of African Americans escaping Jim Crow; the rise of manufacturing and the middle class; the love affair with automobiles; the flowering of the American dream; and now . . . the collapse of the economy and the fading American mythos. With its vivid, painterly palette and haunting score, Detropia sculpts a dreamlike collage of a grand city teetering on the brink of dissolution. These soulful pragmatists and stalwart philosophers strive to make ends meet and make sense of it all, refusing to abandon hope or resistance. Their grit and pluck embody the spirit of the Motor City as it struggles to survive postindustrial America and begins to envision a radically different future.

You can watch entire film online here.

These are the stories of the New York Police Department's notorious and illegal Stop and Frisk program, which saw 685,724 illegal searches in 2011 alone. The NYPD is only allowed to stop and search someone if they have reasonable suspicion that they've committed a crime, making stops on the basis of skin color illegal. 87% of New York City's black and latino population has been stopped and frisked at some point, and as The New York Times reports in its Op-Doc, "The Scars of Stop and Frisk", the vast majority of those stopped are never ticketed or arrested - 88%, in fact. In a twisted kind of apartheid, young men and women of color in New York City are being stopped on the basis of their skin color and sometimes detained for hours without reason. Pioneered by the special crimes unit - the same one that killed Amadou Diallo, an innocent man suspected of a rape, in a hail of bullets in 1999 - stop and frisk is truly "the new Jim Crow," as an activist in Nina Berman's short doc on the subject dubs it.

"I'm in fear for my life from the law" RDACBX raps on "Stop! Stop and Frisk!" featuring Rebel Diaz, Vithym and Luss, the video for which features snapshots of recent victims of NYPD overreach and is "dedicated to the mothers of victims of Police Terrorism." It was produced after the February 2 killing of an unarmed 18-year-old, Rahmarley Graham, in the Bronx, which occurred a week after officers administered a Rodney King-style beating on another unarmed youth, 19-year-old Jatiek Reed. As victims of fatal police brutality have piled up - Patrick Dorismond, Sean Bell, Anthony Baez, Malcolm Ferguson, Anthony Rosario - a social movement has formed to reclaim the streets for the people.

[Via]

"Yet if King could see America now, I believe that he would be disappointed, and feel that his work was nowhere near done. He dreamed of a nation in which his children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” But what we actually became is a nation that judges people not by the color of their skin — or at least not as much as in the past — but by the size of their paychecks. And in America, more than in most other wealthy nations, the size of your paycheck is strongly correlated with the size of your father’s paycheck."

"Goodbye Jim Crow, hello class system."

Read the full article here.

[Photo via Flickr]