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A Sacramento-area school district is responding to questions from the American Civil Liberties Union after an elementary school teacher allegedly threw away student posters about the Black Lives Matter movement.

The teacher assigned a project in September related to causes that students at San Juan Unified School District care about and changes they want to see in school.

But when four students created art projects in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, NBC News affiliate KCRA reported that the teacher allegedly decided to throw those posters away and made students do the assignment over again.

The lesson plan came from a parent volunteer for the class, who titled the project Art can manifest in activism can manifest in our communities and school, according to a letter from the ACLU Foundation of Northern California to the San Juan Unified School District.

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The class teacher, who allegedly found the Black Lives Matter posters were overtly political and inappropriate, ultimately threw away those projects and banned the volunteer from returning to the class, the ACLU letter said.

The volunteer said the teacher asked "her whether students were getting shot at the school and demanded answers regarding why a presentation on Black Lives Matter was relevant to Del Paso Manor Elementary," according to the ACLU letter.

"(The teacher) pressed our parent to say why she felt that Black Lives Matter was an appropriate topic to be discussed at school, and also to explain how Black Lives Matter was something they should be talking about when there's no shootings that happened at the school," wrote Abre Conner, a staff attorney with ACLU Foundation of Northern California.

The ACLU claims that the teacher's actions amounted to an attempt to censor the parent volunteer's free speech. It also noted that under California's Education Code, student freedom of speech is protected.

By censoring and punishing the students, the school violated their constitutional free speech rights, and sent the damaging message that supporting Black lives is not welcome in their classrooms, Conner said in the statement.

The school district maintains the assignment was for students to produce artwork related to changes they wanted to see within the school, not larger social issues. Those who engaged in larger commentary were asked to redo the assignment, the district said.

"It is inconsistent with our values and never our intent or desire for any student to feel uncomfortable or unwelcome to discuss issues that are important to them," the district said in a statement. "We sincerely apologize if this experience made any student feel such discomfort. Censoring a student's assigned work because of its content would not be acceptable."

The ACLU is asking the district to provide a public apology, allow the parent to return to her role as a classroom volunteer, hang student Black Lives Matter posters during a spring art display, provide curriculum and events that include Black Lives Matter and create cultural and sensitivity training for staff as well as parent engagement training.

Phil McCausland is an NBC News reporter focused on the rural-urban divide.

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A California teacher threw away student art on Black Lives Matter, the ACLU says - NBC News

Hollywood has long been fascinated with the figure of the black police officer. On screen, black cops and federal agents show that the apparatus of the state can be diverse, funny, kind and even anti-racist. They suggest that the uniform, which has been worn to police and intimidate black people, can be repurposed to give black people authority and power to fight injustice. Agent J (Will Smith) in Men in Black, the unfortunately named Jefferson Davis (Brian Tyree Henry) in Into the Spiderverse, Raymond Holt (Andre Braugher) in Brooklyn 99 they're friendly crusaders for justice. They get you to root for the police.

The Black Lives Matter movement has focused antiracist activism and critique on the police. In response, Hollywood has doubled down on its portrayal of black police officers.

Recently, the Black Lives Matter movement has focused anti-racist activism and critique on the police. In response, Hollywood has doubled down on its portrayal of black police officers and nowhere more than in HBOs new "Watchmen" television series. The star, Angela Abar (Regina King), is a police officer who is also a superhero; with her at the center of the show, the black cop becomes an almost mythological figure. Episode six of the series goes even further, turning the black cop into the single originary hero of the Watchmen universe.

(Spoilers below.)

"Watchmen" is set in an alternate, much more racially progressive 2019. But episode six is a flashback. Will Reeves (Louis Gossett Jr.), a black police officer in the 1940s, discovers a plot by the KKK to use mind control to force black people to kill each other. Reeves' fellow white officers are enthusiastic participants in the conspiracy and they hang Reeves by the neck from a tree, strangling him within within an inch of his life to prevent his interference. Reeves, though, takes the hood from his attempted lynching, and makes a mask of it to cover his face while he fights the Klan. He becomes Hooded Justice this world's first superhero, who inspires all the others.

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"The black police officer emerged as this tortured figure with split alliances, who needed to still help maintain order," Steven Thrasher, a Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism professor whose scholarship focuses on social justice issues, told me. "I think emotionally what it's supposed to do is get audiences, particularly black audiences, to look at black police officers and to feel sympathetic for them, rather than to question the institution of policing, or to think about how it's structurally racist."

Thrasher points to the first episode of "Watchmen," in which a black cop has to convince his superior to let him unlock his gun to confront a violent white supremacist. The officer is killed because of the delay in weapon authorization. The world of "Watchmen" has more restraints on police; cops can't use firearms without getting specific clearance. But the show encourages you to see these restraints as dangerous bureaucratic interference.

The world of "Watchmen" has more restraints on police. But the show encourages you to see these restraints as dangerous bureaucratic interference.

In the real world, the speed with which police resort to lethal force regularly results in the murder of young black children and the shooting of black people peacefully sitting in their homes. But through the figure of the black cop, "Watchmen" presents an alternate reality in which black people are endangered when police are slower to fire guns. "I found myself cheering for the black cop in that scene, which I realized was a form of emotional manipulation," Thrasher said.

Episode six similarly encourages viewers to identify their own safety and fate with that of a black police officer. At the beginning of the episode, Angela Abar has taken drugs which make her remember Will Reeves' life. Throughout the show Angela, watching like the viewer, periodically replaces Will. She stands in his place when he's sworn in as a cop; she experiences his near-lynching with him. She models the reaction of the audience, and particularly of a black audience, which is supposed to empathize and identify with this particular police officer.

What this police officer does is telling. James Baldwin observed that black police officers in the 30s and 40s were often eager to prove themselves by arresting or harassing black people. This is why, he argues, "black cops were yet more terrifying than white ones."

But Will never accosts loitering black kids, or rounds up black sex workers, or exercises his authority against any black people at all. Instead, he spends his time arresting a white man who firebombed a Jewish deli, and patiently listening to a traumatized black female suspect. His wife dislikes his police work and his vigilante crusade but only because it stains his soul with anger and violence. He never does anything shameful. He is never implicated in the day-by-day racist bullying and harassment which would have made up much of police work in the 1940s. A whole barrel of bad apples can't corrupt the pure black cop.

To its credit, "Watchmen" is unflinching in its depiction of the ugliness of the barrel. The episode is a bleak picture of how American institutions, and especially American law enforcement, is in league with white supremacy. The Klan and the police force are indistinguishable; their goals, and indeed their membership, are one and the same.

The episode is a bleak picture of how American institutions, and especially American law enforcement, is in league with white supremacy.

Nor are alternate institutions of justice any better. Reeves inspires other heroes, who eventually become the super team known as the Minutemen. But to work with them, Reeves has to wear white makeup around his eyes under his mask so his colleagues won't know he's black. When he tries to enlist the heroes in fighting the Klan, they're uninterested and hostile. The superheroes aren't part of the Klan themselves, as the cops are, but the are still white. They don't think black people can be helped and they resent being asked to try.

In the original "Watchmen" comic, Hooded Justice's identity was uncertain, but it was heavily suggested that he was a white man. By making him black, the television show deliberately restores black heroism to the center of American history. It insists that justice, in the United States, is justice for black people, or it is worthless. This is a powerful and noble interpretation.

But "Watchmen" still can't imagine justice, hooded or otherwise, separate from policing. The alternative to a racist white police force, for "Watchmen," is not black activism or collective action. It's simply a better, blacker police officer.

When Hooded Justice joins the Minutemen, one of Will's white comrades tells him he is especially welcome to the team because, "you legitimize the whole enterprise." We're supposed to understand that the Minutemen are using Will to shore up their own racist and blinkered vision of justice. We're not necessarily supposed to recognize that by using the image of the black cop, "Watchmen" may be doing the same thing.

Noah Berlatsky is a freelance writer and cultural critic based in Chicago. He edits the website The Hooded Utilitarian and is the author of several books, including most recently "Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941-1948."

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HBO's 'Watchmen' tackles criminal justice and race, but can't see past the hero black cop trope - NBC News

From an artistic perspective, the past decade in movies is the decade of mumblecore. The movement of intimately scaled, often improvised, low-budget dramas and comedies that pull their actors from the lives and milieux of filmmakers who build stories around their personal experiences has become the energy-giving core of the American cinema. All decade long, aside from the reliably surprising masterworks by established filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Spike Lee, Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, Frederick Wiseman, and Paul Thomas Anderson, there has been a profusion of daring films by younger filmmakers who are part of the mumblecore constellation, as well as a bunch of actors (and cinematographers and other artists) who emerged from those films.

The mumblecore generation has now entered, and in many ways transformed, the true mainstream of movies: Greta Gerwig, Terence Nance, Josephine Decker, Andrew Bujalski, Amy Seimetz, Barry Jenkins, Joe Swanberg, Lena Dunham, Adam Driver, Sophia Takal, Nathan Silver, Shane Carruth, David Lowery, Kate Lyn Sheil, Alex Ross Perry, Kentucker Audley, Lynn Shelton, Robert Greene, Ronald Bronstein, and the Safdie brothers, to name just a few. I could nearly have filled my decade list with their filmsbut, in the interest of spreading (and acknowledging) the love, I included only a few exemplary ones.

Of course, whats overarchingly important in this decade in movies reaches far beyond the movies themselves. Most crucially, this has been the decade of the public acknowledgmentwith the activism and advocacy of the #MeToo, Times Up, Black Lives Matter, and #OscarsSoWhite movements, along with the accusations against Harvey Weinstein and many other men in the mediaof the rotting foundation on which the film industry and society at large are built. The misrepresentations, whitewashings, banalizations, and exclusions that have sustained the Hollywood system have begun to come to light, and there have even been consequences for some of the perpetrators.

The response of the movie industry to this heroic and pain-filled activism has been not even quarter-assed. The Academy has taken much bruited yet minor steps to diversify its membership (which still named the white-savior movie Green Book Best Picture). Reboots of mediocre so-called classics get made with women in the leading roles and, often under mens direction and studio supervision, improve the rancid source material incrementally. Superhero productions feature three women striding silently into battle rather than none, and reliably include actors of color in roles of ahistorical and impersonal substance. There are the noteworthy exceptions, such as Black Panther, which, as good as it is, remains the one film that the systems defenders trot out as its justification.

Yet this decade has also seen, in surprising ways, the convergence of these two currents of activism and aesthetics in ways that I hope will continue in the next decade and beyond. Many of the substantial changes in the industry have come from the new generation of filmmakersyes, mumblecore. Its creators put into bold artistic action the fundamental premise that promises to turn minor shifts in the industry into a sea change: namely, the idea that the personal experience of filmmakers and a films participants is inseparable from the films process, its subject, its contents, and its style. (The idea is at work in documentaries, too.) The necessity, the urgency, of diversifying the ranks of directors is inseparable from the diversification of the spectrum of experienceand of artistic inspirationthat the cinema can offer. The first-person accounts, the daringly original artistry, and the self-aware and group-oriented activities of these filmmakers have opened the cinema to far more varied voices and ideas.

The rise of this generation of filmmakers has coincided with the rise of independent production, which has taken the place of studios for director-driven movies. At the same time, this shift hasnt helped many independent filmmakers from earlier years whose artistry is among the treasures of their times and whom the industry has nonetheless ignored. This decade was also the decade in which Julie Dash, Wendell B. Harris, Jr., Rachel Amodeo, Leslie Harris, Zeinabu irene Davis, and Billy Woodberry still didnt make their second features. Spike Lee long found himself shut out even of independent financing, using his own money for Red Hook Summer and then turning to Kickstarter before being, um, restablished, at a time when he was already long established and his projects should have been prime productions.

Nonetheless, independent productions, including both new filmmakers and the generations of veterans, have, for the most part, proved to be liberating for filmmakers, and that system is one of the reasons why American filmmaking has been so artistically innovative all decade longeven if much of that filmmaking has been an economic sidebar to Hollywood product.

The decade of independent filmmaking not coincidentally parallels the decade of the Marvel juggernaut, which began in 2008, with Iron Man, and soon thereafter came to dominate the box office, the release calendar, and multiplex screensthree factors that are askew to the art of movies. What renders the Marvel trend significant is that it has come to command the so-called discourse and has marked the careers of directors and actors. Superhero movies themselves may offer a modicum of pleasure, and, on rare occasion, even more. Some of them feature delightful effects, moments of symbolic resonance, playful humor, and even a few striking performances that mesh well with the stark (or, rather, Stark) writing. These pleasuresyes, authentically cinematicare, however, secondary to the over-all tone that these movies convey: highly managed production to the point of inhumanity. The superhero movies seldom transmit more than a glimmer of personal sensibility, and almost never do so through the essence of movies: images and sounds. The green screen and the computer graphics take precedence. Thats why many directors of less-than-distinctive visual sensibility get hired by Marvel to make superhero movies; they basically direct actors, while the visuals are farmed out to technicians and specialists. Thats also why the Marvel movies are, over all, deadening.

Many critics bemoan another of the decades trends, a related one: because the studios have turned to superheroes, childrens movies, franchises, and assorted other bombastic spectacles, theyve stopped making (or, actually, drastically cut back on) so-called mid-range dramas for adults. I find the complaint misplaced: there are plenty of good and substantial movies being made, not often by the studios but, rather, by independent producers, and also by streaming services. Meanwhile, that categorys place in the mainstream has been taken over by serious-minded television seriesand, with only a handful of exceptions, theyre basically the same thing: script-delivery systems, minus discernible directorial originality or inventiveness. When studios were the only game in town, directors went to them hat in hand, knowing that, with large budgets at stake, their films had to be commercial. Most of the best ones werent (one timely example: Martin Scorseses The King of Comedy, from 1983, cost nineteen million dollars to make and took in two and a half million dollars at the box office), and, as a result, the best directors careers were imperilled, often stalled, even completely shut down.

Now such ambitious movies of substance are rarely being made by studios but by independent producers, and theyre not being made on a mid-range budget but on low budgets. In exchange, directors are freer than ever to make movies without the distortions and the trivializations that the heavy hands of studio executives imposed. Filmmakers themselves, and their personal visions, are whats being sold by these independent producers, and, as a result, they can make movies as they see fitwhich is why there are many more American movies on the decade list than I expected going into it.

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The Twenty-Seven Best Movies of the Decade - The New Yorker

PLYMOUTH, Mass. (AP) Happy Thanksgiving to you in the land your forefathers stole.

Thats the in-your-feast message Native Americans are preparing to send as they convene their 50th annual National Day of Mourning in the seaside town where the Pilgrims settled.

United American Indians of New England has held the solemn remembrance on every Thanksgiving Day since 1970 to recall what organizers describe as the genocide of millions of native people, the theft of native lands and the relentless assault on native culture.

But Thursdays gathering will have particular resonance and, indigenous people say, a fresh sense of urgency.

Plymouth is putting the final touches on next years 400th anniversary commemorations of the Pilgrims landing in 1620. And as the 2020 events approach, descendants of the Wampanoag tribe that helped the newcomers survive are determined to ensure the world doesnt forget the disease, racism and oppression the European settlers brought.

We talk about the history because we must, said Mahtowin Munro, a co-leader of the group.

The focus is always on the Pilgrims. Were just going to keep telling the truth, she said. More and more nonnative people have been listening to us. Theyre trying to adjust their prism.

As they have on every Thanksgiving for the past half-century, participants will assemble at noon on Coles Hill, a windswept mound overlooking Plymouth Rock, a memorial to the colonists arrival.

Beneath a giant bronze statue of Massasoit, the Wampanoag leader in 1620, Native Americans from tribes around New England will beat drums, offer prayers and read speeches before marching through Plymouths historic district, joined by dozens of sympathetic supporters.

Organizers say theyll also call attention to the plight of missing and murdered indigenous women, as well as government crackdowns on migrants from Latin America and the detentions of children. Promotional posters proclaim: We didnt cross the border the border crossed us!

Past gatherings have mourned lives lost to the nationwide opioid addiction crisis, shown solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and condemned environmental degradation.

The tradition was born of Plymouths last big birthday bash in 1970 a 350th anniversary commemoration that triggered angry demonstrations by native people excluded from a decidedly Pilgrim-focused observance.

Since then, the National Day of Mourning has become a louder, prouder and increasingly multiethnic affair in the community nicknamed Americas Hometown.

Although mostly peaceable, there has been tension. In 1997, 25 protesters were arrested after their march through town erupted into a melee with police.

There have also been colorful moments. Over the decades, activists have ceremonially buried Plymouth Rock in sand, boarded the Mayflower II a replica of the ship that carried the English settlers to the New World and draped Ku Klux Klan garb on a statue of William Bradford, a Pilgrim father who eventually became governor of the Plymouth Bay Colony.

In a likeminded tradition dating to 1975, tribes in the San Francisco area hold a similar ceremony called Unthanksgiving Day, gathering at sunrise on Alcatraz Island to recall how Native Americans occupied the island in protest for 19 months starting in November 1969.

Francis Bremer, a Pilgrim scholar and professor emeritus of history at Pennsylvanias Millersville University, thinks the nation is becoming more receptive to a side of the story thats too often been ignored.

Fifty years ago, for nonnative people, these were uncomfortable truths they didnt want to hear. Now theyre necessary truths, he said.

To help right old wrongs, Munros coalition is pushing what it calls the Massachusetts Indigenous Legislative Agenda. Among other things, the campaign includes a proposal to redesign the state flag, which critics say is repressive. It depicts a muscular arm wielding a broadsword over a Native American holding a bow.

Paula Peters, a Wampanoag writer and activist who isnt a member of the group that organizes the public mourning, sees progress in getting Americans to look past the Thanksgiving myth of Pilgrims and natives coexisting peacefully.

We have come a long way, she said. We continue to honor our ancestors by taking our history out of the margins and into the forefront.

___

Follow Bill Kole on Twitter at https://twitter.com/billkole .

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No thanks: Native Americans to hold 50th gathering of grief - Associated Press

The Progressive Era left a mixed record, largely because progressives were too hostile to political parties as crucial engines of political engagement and overly optimistic about the power of independent, rational judgment. But the eras reforms solved a particular problem of corrupt, top-down power at a particular moment. Each reformist movement can be expected only to resolve its most pressing problems in a way that keeps democracy going for a future era of reform

When future historians look back on the 2010s, they will observe three larger trends that paved the way for a new era of reform by clearing away the old consensus: a loss of faith in neoliberal economics, the breakdown of white male-dominated social and cultural hierarchies, and the collapse of the normal political process.

The financial crisis of 2008-09 and the decades-long stagnation of middle-class wages shattered the neoliberal faith that loosely regulated markets naturally bring widespread prosperity. In the last decade, leaders in both parties have turned (rhetorically, at least) against the global trade and financial system, mouthing the frustrations of voters.

The new tech giants now wield a kind of power as the central nodes of commerce and information that we havent seen since the railroads of the Gilded Age. For most Americans, the economy feels unfair. Capitalism has lost its luster, particularly for younger Americans. As in the Progressive Era, corporate domination and corruption are widely agreed to be a problem.

On the changing social and cultural order, both Me Too and Black Lives Matter represent profound and emblematic new social movements not just because they spotlighted and remedied longstanding injustices. They are also profound because they show how new technology and new forms of media have upended traditional power relationships by amplifying previously marginalized stories. For instance, the number of women, and particularly women of color, running for (and winning) public office has increased significantly over the last few years.

These cultural changes have provoked a backlash that contributed to Donald Trumps rise and the associated growth of alt-right movements. Fights over identity now define national partisan competition because they echo and reinforce fundamental divides in the ethnic and geographical coalitions of the two major parties and amplify the zero-sum stakes of two-party electoral conflict. The unceasing culture war is a battle over two very different and diverging visions.

On the political system itself: The conflicts over economics and culture are intimately tied to declining faith in politics as usual and the growing distrust of government. But in a politics oriented around zero-sum questions of national identity, and with razors edge control of Congress constantly at stake, compromise equates to surrender.

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Trumps Election May Have Been the Shock We Needed - The New York Times