Watts Rebellion, Los Angeles, California, August 13, 1965 Having grown up swathed in unrecognized white privilege (i.e. The Fifties), I accepted the common term “riots,” which the mainstream media used to delegitimize the violence. I was unaware of Black rebellions in the past – they were certainly never mentioned in history class. And the first one that hit Los Angeles, the Watts Rebellion of August 1965, packed a wallop. Six days of unabated rampage and crackdown produced 34 deaths,1,032 injuries, and over $40 million in property damage. Newspapers were filled with front-page photos of carnage and burning. I was fifteen and, though familiar with the potential condensation of suspicion that being Jewish sometimes produced, I never thought to apply it to other minority groups. I never questioned why there were no African Americans in my neighborhood, very few in Pasadena High, rare on TV except for the sports news. I wasn’t primed for fear. Anyway, Pasadena was 20 miles away from the mayhem, and suburban life continued as it always had. The rebellion remained distant. It hadn’t sensitized me to the conditions that brought about the rebellion in the first place: high unemployment, poor schools, inferior living conditions – POVERTY. All these facets of systemic racism were meticulously elaborated in the McCone Report, commissioned by the governor, ceremoniously received, then consigned to oblivion. Three years later, Dr. King was assassinated, and violence erupted in 125 cities around the country. But not Los Angeles. I was a senior, still at Pasadena High and was appalled like everybody else. Less than three months later, Robert Kennedy (the hero, not the fruitcake) was assassinated, also in Los Angeles. It seemed like a violent time. People spoke fearfully of “the long hot summers” that would ignite Black rage and consume other neighborhoods. For the next dozen years, all seemed quiet (or effectively clamped down) on the racial front – if you were white. White America refused to recognize that police departments all over the country could commit atrocities on Black individuals and communities with impunity. The inciting incident for all these rebellions was white cops taking African Americans into custody with horrifically excessive violence. That sparked the Miami Rebellion of 1980. Then the chickens came home to roost again. On March 3, 1991, African American motorist Rodney King was viciously beaten by four white officers while being arrested. This police brutality, usually invisible to the public and strenuously denied by the men in blue, was caught on camera and broadcast on local and national news. This video, the first of its kind (such violence now being sadly commonplace), shocked Americans across the country – again, the white ones. But since the cat was out of the bag in such a public manner, the Los Angeles Police Department had to put the four officers on leave and give them up to a State trial for excessive use of force. (King suffered a fractured skull, a broken right ankle, broken teeth, and permanent neurological damage.) The trial venue was moved from Los Angeles Country to the all-white town of Simi Valley. On April 29, 1992 the jury of ten white men, one Asian, and one Latino, acquitted all four police officers of assault. The Rodney King riots started that same day. The rebellion lasted six days, quelled only by the combined forces of the State. 63 people died (no law enforcement officials), 2,383 were reported injured, some 3,600 fires were set destroying 1,100 buildings. Estimated property damage swung from $800 million to $1 billion. I was teaching at UC Irvine in April of ‘92. Once again, I was showered with news and images of the violence, only this time I was even further from the action – 40 miles. And yet there was a palpable anxiety in this largely white, well off, and extremely conservative town. (I only spent six months there and disliked it intensely.) We didn’t really expect the maddened Black mob to invade our space and torch our buildings, but they were so volatile! Would it be even safe to goto events or parties in Los Angeles? I was in complete sympathy with the Black community, had been since I learned about the injustices of racism in college, and that was 20 years ago. I shook my head in disbelief at the announcement of the verdicts, but I had never chafed under the yoke of racism. I didn’t understand how much I didn’t understand until October 3, 1995. Once again, the news came out of Los Angeles. On that October day of 1995, O.J. Simpson was acquitted of the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. Like everybody else in America, I’d had the 8-month trial crammed down my throat, and O.J.’s erratic behavior the day of the murder combined with the preponderance of physical evidence all pointed to one verdict – and it was the opposite of what the Simi Valley jury had delivered. “That’s outrageous!” I thought to myself. “How can this be?” When the shoe was on the other foot, I felt the actual pinch. –Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Harlem Renaissance (The California Connection) SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Alice Dunbar-Nelson painted by Laura Wheeler Waring “A rising tide lifts all boats,” as the saying goes, but in the case of the possible career advancement offered to African American writers during the 1920s, male ships had much more buoyancy. The interest in Black life and Black writing as evinced by race-related journals (The Crisis, Opportunity), publishing houses, and even the occasional mainstream magazine provided platforms for women writers as well as men. Scores of women published poems, wrote plays (usually unproduced), and even the occasional novel. But now, 100 years later, which names survive? Who has been rediscovered? Who anthologized? Who still discussed? If you can name anyone besides Nella Larsen, whose posthumous rediscovery has made her reputation soar far beyond the modest acclaim she achieved during her lifetime, or Zora Neale Hurston, who didn’t start publishing her novels until after the Depression of the 1930s had strangled the literary wing of the Renaissance, you have an extraordinarily deep knowledge of the period. Who published the most novels during the Harlem Renaissance? Jessie Fauset (4). Who wrote the most plays? Georgia Douglas Johnson (28). Who cares? Who reads them? One of the young poets who recited at the famous 1925 Civic Club dinner that intentionally launched the literary Harlem Renaissance was Gwendolyn Bennet. (Langston Hughes was the other young poet on display.) Bennett was a double threat girl. She trained as a visual artist at both Columbia and Pratt and in 1924 was the beneficiary of a scholarship enabling her to study fine arts in Paris. When she returned to Harlem in 1926, she participated in the full flower of the Renaissance both in the visual arts and in print. Women writers were all over the Harlem Renaissance, even when they didn’t live in Harlem. Anne Spencer’s poetry was widely praised, and her Virginia garden provided a Southern outpost of hospitality to visiting Harlemites. Georgia Douglas Johnson (she of the 28 plays) not only published three volumes of poetry during the period of the Renaissance but hosted a weekly “S Street Salon” in her Washington, DC home for writers and intellectuals, including women you’ll never read: May Miller, Marita Bonner, Mary Burrill, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Angelina Weld Grimke. There are obvious reasons why women writers didn’t get as much traction during the Harlem Renaissance as the men – sexism and the demands of domesticity. No matter how much they wrote and whatever the quality of their output, the gatekeepers and assessors of literary value were all men. The editors were men (Jessie Fauset being the one exception); the publishers were men; men dominated the awards committees. The sexism of the period was so much a part of the cultural landscape that it wasn’t even perceived, much less challenged. The final scene of Nella Larsen’s first novel, Quicksand, sounds the alarm plainly enough – and it could probably have only come from a woman’s pen. In escaping a life scrambled by her bi-racial background, the sexism and confusion brought on by her beauty, Helga Crane, the novel’s protagonist, thinks to put all her confusion and sadness to rest by marrying the backwoods preacher of an Alabama town. By the time she has her fourth child, she realizes that she is trapped in the quicksand of domesticity. She hates her husband, the town, and everything about her life, but she has no resources available for her escape. Nor can she bear the thought of abandoning her children. She falls sick after the birth of her fourth child and, while in recovery, fantasizes about a possible return to her former life. “And hardly had she left her bed and become able to walk again without pain, hardly had the children returned from the homes of the neighbors, when she began to have her fifth child.” It is a stark and shocking ending. For women writers of the Harlem Renaissance who, after all, still had to find a man to support them or support themselves, the choice was either a precarious existence as a single woman or some kind of domestic deal with the devil (i.e. marriage). (Lesbians naturally didn’t face that choice since they never thought of themselves as appendages to any man.) Oftentimes marriage, especially when it produced children, signalled the end of their literary careers. Jessie Fauset married in 1929 at the advanced age of 47, moved with her husband to Montclair, NJ, published two more novels, and went silent. Gwendolyn Brooks fell in love with a fellow instructor at Howard University, a relationship the administration deplored. When they married in 1927, Brooks followed her husband to Eustis, FL, where she had to endure Southern racism and isolation from the community, which inspired her until the couple moved to Long Island in 1930. She remained passionately involved in the Harlem art scene, but her days as a writer were over. The life and career of Georgia Douglas Johnson illustrates the challenges of a heterosexual woman writer who marries, not unwillingly. Born in 1880 in Atlanta, she married a local lawyer and prominent Republican party member ten years her senior. They had two sons and moved to Washington, DC, where her husband had been appointed to a political patronage position. Torn from her childhood home, Douglas found solace in writing, but her husband insisted that she devote more time to keeping his house and raising his family. Nonetheless, she brought out her first volume in 1918. (In its relation to the published works of the Harlem Renaissance, it is remarkably early.) Its lead poem, giving title to the whole volume, is dedicated to her husband and says it all. The Heart of a Woman The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn, As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on, Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home. The heart of a woman falls back with the night, And enters some alien cage in its plight, And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars. --Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in "The Pit Bull of AIDS Litigation" SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Alice Philipson - Berkeley based solo practitioner, 1987 In the 1980s, queer lawyers were still reluctant to come out publicly. They could lose jobs, clients, positions, possibly cases decided by homophobic judges. But in the year 1980, 10 lawyers came together to found BALIF [Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom]. My lesbian sister Alice, a solo practitioner in Berkeley, soon came into its orbit. Shortly afterwards, healthy young gay men began dying in alarming numbers. Informally known as the "gay plague," fear and stigma dictated the initial public response. By 1983 public health workers were fully aware of the potential scope of the AIDS crisis. Still, the Reagan administration wouldn't even mention the disease until 1985, two weeks after Rock Hudson had publicly come out (and died) with his diagnosis. In the meantime, the plague was raging in the Bay Area. Eventually, two thirds of the men of BALIF died. Lawyers went to the AIDS wards of San Francisco General Hospital to write up emergency wills for young men who had never conceived they'd need such a thing at their age. And there they found out about many other abuses -- men who lost their jobs, their rentals, access to their deceased partner's lives on the mere suspicion that they were gay. When HIV testing became widespread in 1986 (but without cure or mitigation), gay men were exposed to a whole new wave of discrimination and stigma, plus the cold-blooded violation of right to privacy and the exposure of medical information. Returning home from a short stay in the hospital, an AIDS patient might find the contents of his apartment strewn on the street. The BALIF lawyers started an AIDS Legal Referral Panel, the first of its kind, and the cases that seemed the most unjust, the most tangled, the most hopeless -- these they handed to my sister, who became known as "the pit bull of AIDS litigation." Burning with rage and sorrow, she went after the insurance companies who immediately voided their policies, HR departments who disclosed the HIV status of their employees, hospitals who informed their patients through voicemail that their tests had come back positive, landlords who used the possibility of an AIDS diagnosis as a pretext for bouncing tenants out of rent controlled apartments. All of it was illegal, and she had to combat the constant stream of lies and obfuscations coming from these institutions. She could only get them to acknowledge the harm they had done through trial or the threat of trial. (Not that they cared. It was only faggots and their ball-busting bitch of a lawyer.) As her clients descended into the final stages of their illness, she became their advocate in life as well as in law. They loved her, and she couldn't help but love them in return. But they died; they all died. Alice had to work feverishly sometimes to get a judgment before her clients passed. She had to watch as the midwestern families who had refused to visit their dying sons came out to claim the body, clean out the apartment that son might be sharing with his lover, and bar the man who was himself prostrate with grief from attending the funeral. She wasn't alone, although she was the most out there. The men were exhausted and, if not sick themselves, depleted by the loss of friends and lovers. There was so much work to be done, and the lesbians of BALIF stepped up big time: advocacy, activism, practical care, human kindness. They showed up, as did so many lesbians, in their glory of "getting shit done." The interns who worked for my sister volunteered for duty at the AIDS Legal Referral Panel for two years after passing the bar. My sister died in 2022, and I didn't think to ask her the question that I then had to pose to her intern and her wife: Why did she do it? Why expend her knowledge, passion, and diminishing strength on these men? The answer was the same from both women and would have been her answer as well: "These are my people." We were part of the same community. And this too is women's history. –Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, Dogged by Domesticity SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan meet with troops on the Golan Heights On October 5, 1973, the State of Israel was still basking in the glow of virtue and success. To quote myself from a previous podcast: Israel seemed, once again, the center of an epic. The oppressed of the Old World had migrated to the Promised Land and had built for themselves a new life of justice and wealth. The kibbutzniks did seem to be a finer, more idealistic breed. They were trying to live according to a communal idea; they had profited from the labor of their own hands; they had made the land produce as it had never done before and created a new institution out of the Ashkenazi shards blasted from Europe. Israel was the reincarnation of the Jewish state, the biblical history enacted in our time, and the promise at last fulfilled. “May my right hand lose its cunning if I forget thee, O Jerusalem.” The people had remained faithful until the land was again delivered into their hands. And Israel’s deserts bloomed. And, by god, I had seen the deserts bloom! Watermelons and lettuce growing out of the sand! The new settlers had brought with them every ounce of Western culture and technology.The Jewish state was incomparably more advanced then its Arab neighbors. Through guts, skill, and imperiled valor, the tiny beleaguered nation had survived, triumphed, expanded. The Arabs had fled in terror before them, leaving their shoes in the desert as witness to their flight. The Sinai was embraced, Jerusalem reunited. Israeli paratroopers had battled their way through blood and fire to kiss the Wailing Wall with tears of thanksgiving in their eyes. And then, the next day, Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, everything changed. The neighboring states of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon had gotten their butts kicked in the wars of 1948, 1956, and 1967. The Six Day War had been a particularly shameful rout for the Arabs -- the destruction of their air force, the loss of much real estate now under Israeli control, another failed attempt to oust the Jewish state from its home in Palestine. The latest major conflict was only a little over five years in the past. Surely, the Arabs had learned their lesson! But on October 6, Egypt and Syria invaded Israel with a coordinated attack again! And furthermore, the Arabs were more successful in this attack than they had ever been before. Israel was caught on its back foot. The first days of the war saw losses of matériel, life and land that the young nation had never experienced before. Furthermore, the reliable Western allies who had been such staunch supporters of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 weren't quite so reliable. England conditioned its support on a return of Israel to its 1967 borders (not gonna happen, bro!), and France, mindful of its dependence on Middle Eastern oil, adopted a policy of supposed neutrality, imposing an arms embargo on all the belligerents. The Soviet Union jumped in as an arms supplier to the Arab states, which pushed President Nixon to offer a full-scale airlift of military equipment on October 10. This U.S. assistance replenished Israeli forces, allowing Israel to launch a successful counter-offensive. By the time a U.N.-brokered ceasefire took hold on October 25, Israel had recouped its military losses and had even advanced into Egyptian and Syrian territory. David, it seemed, had emerged victorious from its battle with Goliath yet again. But the war shattered Israel's complacency about its invincible military superiority, and the label of underdog which had served it so well in the first twenty-five years of its existence was shifting over to the Arabs. After 1973, the hot war of Middle Eastern conflict was between the Israelis and the Palestinians, not between sovereign states. As an occupied people, Palestinians were able to surpass Jews in the Victim Sweepstakes that conditioned international perception. In 1975, the U.N. passed a resolution determining that Zionism was a form of racism and promoted racial discrimination. (Israel didn't help its case here by allying itself with the Afrikaaner Republic of South Africa from the mid-70s to the late 80s.) Israel's former Western champions, England, France, and the European Union, demanded a return to the 1967 borders and a solution to the problem of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lived precariously and without political rights under Israeli rule. A flicker of hope flashed when the Oslo Accords of 1998 were signed recognizing (in theory) a two-state solution, but Israel's promise was a hollow one, gradually gutted by the country's rightward drift. The brutality of Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, as evidenced by the two Intifadas of Palestinian uprising, fatally tarnished Israel's reputation. The Jews were now the bullies in the Middle East. This was profoundly confusing to Jews in the diaspora who were used to thinking of themselves either as victims or as aspirants to full citizenship in countries with histories of antisemitism. We'd never had a state before where we could oppress other people! Ardent Zionists the world over refused (and still refuse) to acknowledge Israel's crimes and failures. And even ambivalent Jews have this secret thought. "It *could* happen here; if it does, I'm glad there's a refuge for me." The Jewish response to Israel's fall from grace was mostly to double down (with honorable exceptions, of course). Did the growth of Orthodox Jews and political conservatives create a bloc that works tirelessly to ensure no loss of land through the creation of a Palestinian state? Did the Israeli electorate put Benjamin Netanyahu, the worst Jewish leader in modern history, into the top office time and again? Did the American Jewish community direct any of its clout and wealth to pressure Israel into genuinely working towards the two-state solution it had presumably endorsed but was flagrantly trashing through its support of illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank? O well! You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. We have a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card with the undeniable 2000-year history of antisemitism. And friends in high places! Do you know what the largest American pro-Israel lobbying group is? (No, it's not AIPAC.) Christians United for Israel, which has over seven million members! God help us! If only He would leave the Holy Land for more peaceful climes! Like Greenland! --Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in Hating Nixon -- A Family Tradition SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Born in 1950, I knew about Richard Nixon from the dawn of consciousness -- and he was synonymous with Evil. I inherited my contempt of Nixon from my father, an FDR liberal who had come of age during the Great Depression. My father came by his hatred of Nixon honestly. As a resident of L.A., he had seen up close the gangrenous success of Nixon's red-baiting during his first political campaign against Jerry Voorhis in 1946 for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Nixon caught the postwar anticommunist wave early and rode it to a national reputation when he ran Alger Hiss to the ground as a Soviet spy -- the first real victory for the House Un-American Activities Committee. What really cemented my father's antipathy towards Nixon, however, was his 1950 campaign against Helen Gahagen Douglas to represent California in the U.S. Senate. The communist smear tactic which had stood him such good stead was amped up by the distribution of hundreds of thousands of pink sheets slanting Douglas' voting record as "evidence" of communist beliefs. This earned him the well-suited moniker "Tricky Dick." But the dirtiest trick was the phone call my parents received asking if they knew that Helen Gahagan Douglas was married to a Jew. Click! That solidified my father's hatred, and Nixon won. The following decade saw Nixon's rapid political rise through red-baiting, pandering, gross hypocrisy, and sheer effrontery. The best example of the latter was the way he wriggled out of a potential scandal when he was on the 1952 Republican ticket as Vice President. News of Nixon's improprieties relating to a fund established by his backers to reimburse him for his political expenses threatened to throw him out of the race. Nixon went on national television (a rarity for the time period) to defend himself, attack his opponents, and urge the audience to contact the Republican National Committee to advise whether he should remain on the ticket. And then, the maudlin arrow aimed straight at America's 1950s heart. He did receive one gift -- a cocker spaniel his children had named Checkers. "And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we're gonna keep it." The Checkers speech cemented Nixon's appeal to Middle America, which he maintained until the Watergate scandal forced him to resign his presidency. My father was further disgusted, and the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket swept into office for two terms. My father's hatred was somewhat assuaged by Nixon's loss to JFK in the 1960 presidential election and, surprisingly, his 1962 defeat for governor of California at the hands of the liberal incumbent Pat Brown. Always a sore loser, Nixon petulantly declared to the press, "You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” Music to my father's ears, but it was just another Nixon lie. It took him six years to shake off the "loser" label, but he never stopped scheming, campaigning, and picking off his conservative rivals until he secured the Republican nomination in 1968. He then torpedoed Humphrey's chance for election by secretly sabotaging potential peace talks brokered by Lyndon Johnson (a dirty trick which extended the Vietnam war by six years and cost more thousands of American lives), and came into the office he felt was his by right. I was nineteen and a freshman in college when Nixon ascended to the presidency. It was my turn to hate Nixon, and there was a lot to hate: his bullshit "secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam; his cynical racist dog-whistling that captured the "solid South" of white bigots for the Republican party; his divisive rhetoric that pitted his so-called Silent Majority against their own children ("hippies" "draft dodgers"). The "secret plan" remained a secret for the next six years but involved extending the war into neighboring Cambodia. Those of us who took temporary shelter behind the draft deferment afforded to full-time college students grew increasingly hysterical when it appeared as though *we* might be sent into the senseless slaughter of a war nobody could understand or justify in any credible manner. We screamed, protested, took over campuses, and blocked freeways. Nothing could move the Establishment, not even the killing of four student protestors at Kent State in May of 1970. Nixon reigned imperturbably over it all, and the lies that streamed endlessly from his mouth and those of his henchmen ... We simply couldn't believe that Middle America lapped it all up -- even as their sons, nephews, and husbands were dying. The irony was that Nixon was relatively progressive, especially by today's standards, but we couldn't see, much less celebrate, his achievements. He was Evil Incarnate and it didn't seem to bother him in the least. We knew he had no principles except to win, but we couldn't make Middle America realize that. He had them in the palm of his greasy hand. Tricky Dick's undoing was that he couldn't stand the thought of losing. The 1972 election was a slam-dunk, especially after his most threatening rival, Bobby Kennedy, was gunned down in Los Angeles after winning the California primary. (I was around for that one, too.) When the Democrats chose the unelectable George McGovern as their standard bearer, Nixon rubbed his hands in glee. But still, he had to cheat, to leave no stone unturned, no bug unplanted, no whispering campaign unpursued. With his blessing, he let his henchmen hire incompetent clowns to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex during the election. Two years of agony followed as the fetid stream of lies, leaks and coverups grew in volume until Washington was swamped with investigations, stonewalling, and revelations that pointed inexorably towards the Oval Office. "What did the President know and when did he know it?" My father and I watched in horror. We knew he was guilty, but he still had Middle America and the Republican party at his back. Even though the Watergate scandal brought the country to a standstill, he might very well remain in office. Nothing, it seemed, could kill him off. And then the Oval Office tapes were revealed, subpoenaed, and Nixon actually gave them up after the Supreme Court ordered him to do so. (How innocent we all were back then!) Now the whole world gained entry into Nixon's petty, scheming, paranoid, and always self-serving mindset. It was an (expletive deleted) public relations disaster. Still, he held on. I joined the Peace Corps in the summer of '74 and flew to Philadelphia to meet the rest of my training cohort before we were sent off to the Central African Republic. We asked our Peace Corps Washington liaison what the atmosphere in the nation's capital was like. "Watergated," he replied dourly. It was a great time to leave the country. I will never forget being awakened at 2:00 a.m. on August 9, gathering with other trainees on the balcony of the Agricultural Institute of M'baiki to listen to Nixon's resignation speech on a staticky short-wave radio. The dark, looming rain forest into which we stared only underscored the unreality of what was happening back home. Had Tricky Dick been finally toppled? To paraphrase Gerald Ford's same-day inauguration, our long national nightmare was over. One month later, President Ford gave Nixon a full, unconditional pardon. The fix was in. Who could be surprised? At least, we told ourselves, Nixon was out of public life for good. Ah, but even that stake had not pierced his zombie heart! After a period of illness and gilded disgrace in his rich Pacific seaside mansion, Nixon wrote, schemed, plotted and worked tirelessly for his rehabilitation. My father and I shook our heads. Finally, this truly evil man had gotten his comeuppance ... and nothing for him changed. No contrition, no enlargement of his humanity (missing to begin with), only his inexhaustible hunger for recognition. He wormed his way back into the good graces of the Republican party and subsequent Republican presidents as an Elder Statesman and expert on foreign affairs. He published book after book, pressed his "wisdom" into the ears of Republican presidents as much as they would allow. When he died at the age of 81 in April of 1994, his funeral drew luminaries from around the globe, including every living President. My father died one month later, a far finer man with much less fanfare. With Nixon out of public office, he could relax his hatred. I was not so lucky -- the Reagan snake oil, so attractively packaged and sunnily delivered, proved far more damaging to the national fabric than the overweening egotism of a man who had no ideology, no desire for public service, who only wanted power and recognition. So much worse was to come. -- Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, David Becomes Goliath SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Think one of these will save you from the neo-Nazis? In August of 2017, during the first year of The Pestilence when we all thought his election was a horrible fluke brought about by the electoral college, Charlottesville, Virginia hosted the coming out cotillion of newly emboldened alt-right fringe groups which had formerly lurked in the shadows: neo-fascists, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and far-right militias. Watching the news coverage, I was shocked and confused by the nighttime rally of fascist-leaning young men bearing tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us!” With a population of 2.4%, American Jews might be able to replace the 7.5 million inhabitants of Washington State, but then our numbers are depleted. Even though I knew this was all right-wing lunacy, the math didn’t add up on any level. Finally, a MAGA-head explained it to me. It was a protest against the evil cabal of Jews masterminding the massive influx of Black and Brown people to dilute and displace white Americans, the precious core of our country’s greatness. It’s a canard known as the Great Replacement, first argued delusionally but somewhat coherently by the French writer Renaud Camus (no relation but, alas, gay) in his 2011 book of the same name. The gist is that with the complicity or cooperation of "replacist" elites, the ethnic French and white European populations are being demographically and culturally supplanted by catastrophically fertile people of color through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the white birth rate. This conspiracy theory transfers easily to American soil, and when you’re looking for evil perpetrators of tectonic population shifts requiring vast resources and coordination, who ya gonna call? The Jews, of course! The obvious masterminds! This kind of conspiratorial thinking is endemic to right-wing and nativist movements the world over and down through the ages. It’s antisemitism, pure and simple (well, pure … not so simple). There’s a wealthy, genteel antisemitism in America as well – the discreet scorn and exclusionary practices of the WASP upper crust: elite country clubs, real estate covenants, unspoken quotas on how many Jews should be admitted to universities and white shoe law firms. And you certainly don’t want your children bringing them into the family! Trump actually isn't an antisemite as his use of his Modern Orthodox son-in-law illustrates. True to his transactional modus vivendi of “is it good for me?”, Trump doesn’t stand on antisemitic principle (like Richard Nixon, for example), but he will use antisemitic dog whistles to rally his base. However, Trump and the Republicans have discovered a whole new use for the antisemitism that most of them hold in their hearts. It has become a cudgel for whipping “woke” and pro-Palestinian organizations, notably elite universities, into line. As a Jew, watching attack dog Elise Stefanik outmaneuver Ivy League university presidents with crocodile tears shed for Jewish students (and then crowing about how she’d forced two of them to lose their positions) provided a revolting display of shameless hypocrisy! Like other Trump sycophants, she has no moral center. She would definitely be following orders in Birkenau in 1944. We know this. Her "defense" of us is disgusting! And of course, last month, the Trump administration followed suit, canceling $400 million to Columbia University, pausing $175 million in federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania, and placing more than $9 billion in contracts and grants under review at Harvard University – all egregiously antisemitic institutions, don’t you know! And the right-wing war waged against our most prestigious (but “woke”!) universities barrels onwards … in our name. Is it good for the Jews? Hell no! As a community, we should be screaming against this political equivalent of embedding ideological weaponry in civilian populations. But … antisemitism is on the rise. Do we want to make trouble for an administration whose support of Israel in the face of worldwide condemnation is more crucial than ever? It’s a ticklish subject at a ticklish time. We do not speak with one voice (two Jews, three opinions, as the joke goes), and American Jews in general have felt that working behind the scenes and within the system brings less trouble down upon our vulnerable heads. Will the polite behavior of 1944 prove to be any less effective in these times? Can we not trust Jared Kushner and Sheldon Adelson (lay a stone upon his grave!) to cement our solidarity with the ruling class? Surely they wouldn’t turn against us! Yitgadal v'yitkadash sh'mei raba! --Dr. Robert Philipson SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

My "daughter" and me perched on the edge of the abyss AKA Table Mountain, Cape Town In 2004, I rejoined the Peace Corps for a 10-month assignment in Namibia. When I arrived in the country and met the Namibian woman who administered the teachers' program, she advised me to run, not walk, back into the closet. Homophobia was so deeply entrenched in Namibian society that I couldn’t have done my job had my sexual orientation been disclosed. I had been an out man in the States for over 25 years. At the age of 54, it would have been extremely odd to present myself as single to my Namibian colleagues, so I converted my sister, a lawyer back in Berkeley, to my wife and her daughter, recently graduated from college, to my daughter. I had family album pictures at the ready and a plausible explanation as to why I had come to Namibia by myself. My lawyer “wife” was the breadwinner in the family, and she couldn’t forsake her practice. While establishing a state-of-the-art computer lab in a high school that served one of the poorest (i.e. Black) townships of the capital, Windhoek, I gained a modest renown as the only white man who lived and worked in these non-white areas. White South Africans would occasionally show up at the school for social or developmental initiatives. (Namibia had been a de facto colony of South Africa for 75 years, from 1915 to 1990.) Relations with these fellow whites were easily established but always fleeting. In one case, however, a South African educational consultant spent quite a few days at the high school towards the end of its academic year, and we became quite friendly. Piet, of Afrikaaner descent, was attractive, funny, liberal (for a white South African), and we were both family men! In his early thirties, he had recently married and hoped to start his own family in Sandton, a white suburb of Johannesburg. He already seemed to dote on my “daughter” simply through pictures. My niece, Maya, shared my last name, so that was one less discrepancy to explain away. When I told Piet that Maya and I would be flying out of Johannesburg after a month of touring his country, he delightedly insisted that we contact him when we got to town. And so we did. Piet and his wife, Magda, asked us to meet them at an Italian restaurant in Montecasino, a huge entertainment complex designed to replicate an ancient Tuscan village. We sat on the “outdoor” restaurant terrace overlooking a busy square. The “outdoor” terrace was actually indoors. The whole village was enclosed under an ersatz sky painted on the ceiling, light on one side sliding to darkness on the other. The weather outside was hot and humid, but in our Tuscan village, it was temperate and pleasant. Always temperate and pleasant -- and pretty much all White. Maya had already been playing the role of my daughter ever since we’d met up three weeks earlier in Cape Town. Explaining our real relationship (daughter of two lesbian moms and niece to a “guncle”) was too much and unnecessary information. Anyway, we had plenty of shared family history, and it was easy to bring off. As we were looking at the menu, I teased Maya that I was going to order a double portion of shrimp scampi for the both of us. (She hates shellfish.) “Stop, Unkie!” she protested good-naturedly – a gaffe, but our Afrikaaner hosts didn’t notice. Although Piet had seen some of the world, Magda, much younger, was clearly excited by this unusual outing. She’d never eaten Italian food, and when she asked the waiter what polenta was, he replied, “It’s like fufu.” This was the perfect response given the cultural context. We were charming and Piet was charmed. “My wife and I are hoping for a boy for our first child,” he told me at the end of our meal, “but if I had a daughter like yours, that wouldn’t be so bad.” “Not so bad at all,” I replied with light irony, winking at his wife. She reddened but smiled in complicity. When we parted at the end of our meal, Piet wouldn’t hear of splitting the bill. There was some hesitation on his part as we separated, and I caught a glint of desperation in his eyes but dismissed it as my daughter and I walked further into the gaudy recesses of the main casino. The next morning I woke to Piet’s email: Robert, I can’t tell you how much I was taken with you and your daughter. What a delightful pair, so much evident love between the two of you! I couldn’t say last night what I wanted to say and what you needed to hear. The thought of such wonderful people burning forever kept me up all night. Robert, you must accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior! As someone who cares about you and your daughter, I must speak out. Jesus says, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."(John 14:6) I never wrote back nor replied to the few follow-up emails. What possibility was there for any true communication, any basis for friendship, no matter how sincere he was? He lived in a totalizing world view that brooked no contradictions. The Dutch Reformed Church is a stern and unbending master. The lies about our actual relationship might be forgiven if properly confessed and atoned for, but my being gay? In PIet’s eyes I was already condemned to the flames of hell. Accepting Jesus wouldn’t change that. Were I to die and find out that the Dutch Reformed Church had the afterlife properly pegged all along, I might feel some guilt having dragged my “daughter” into the fiery pits with me. She didn’t have to collude in my lies, helping ensnare the innocent affections of the Saved. I will plead her brief before the Throne of God, if I am allowed to speak. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. -- Robert Philipson SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

In 2003 I unknowingly embarked upon my accidental career as a filmmaker when I enrolled in a video production course at Berkeley City College. I wanted to learn how to operate a video camera in order to document the reminiscences of my father as he walked through Hyde Park, Chicago where he and my mother had grown up. The results were primitive, but I was glad I had gotten them on tape. He died of bladder cancer the following year. Video Production One taught me far more than how to operate a camera. It was an introduction to the art and technique of filmmaking. We made little movies, crewed for one another, learned about sound, lighting, even served as “talent” in front of the cameras. It was fun. And writing scripts, though alien and artificial as a literary form, came naturally to me. I had a good ear for dialogue. My final project was an overly ambitious short narrative using students from the BCC multimedia program, filmed at a friend’s house, and buried as juvenilia until its resurrection this month as the Shoga Treat, “Regendered.” Video Production One led fatally to Video Production Two. More of the same but extending and refining our knowledge. Also we had access, during class time, to a fully equipped studio. I already had a suspicion that I would become a documentary filmmaker. I had been a professor of African and African American literature the previous decade, before the constraints and politics of hiring for tenure-track positions drove me out of academia. Creatively and intellectually I was at loose ends, but documentary film promised a new outlet for the exercise of these interests. At age 54, I wasn’t contemplating a new career. I was twice as old as the typical film student. However what I had that they didn’t was life experience and a subject matter about which I had thought long and deeply. I had realized while still a professor that the Queer Harlem Renaissance needed to be excavated and promoted. (In 2003 this concept was relatively new.) My research had led me to “Prove It On Me Blues” by Ma Rainey, now widely regarded as an anthem of lesbian affirmation but barely known outside of blues histories at the time. I determined to shoot a music video, a cover of the song whose original 1927 Paramount recording was so shoddy that the lyrics were well nigh impossible to understand. Went out last night with a bunch of my friends. They must’ve been women ‘cause I don’t like no men. Now that I had my project, I had only to realize my vision without contacts, technical knowledge, or money. The first thing I did was to introduce myself to Ronnie Stewart of the West Coast Blues Society. To my delight, and for reasons I’ll never understand, he jumped on with both feet. It was he who made the music video happen. He knew the musicians and persuaded Donny Koontz (drums), Ron Joseph (bass), Spiderman Robinson (keyboard), and singer Tia Carroll to drive out to a home studio in Fairfield, perform the song in one take, and then mastered it for the video shoot. Now it was up to me and my video production class. I was friends with the directors of the Lorraine Hansberry Theater, a Black gay couple, and they arranged for the use of costumes, black suits for the musicians, and the one prop, a 1920s microphone. Tia was outfitted in a splendid blue and gold dress. On the appointed day, everybody showed up at the studio, submitted to costume fitting, hair and makeup. Once the musicians were on the floor with their instruments, we students took them through four takes with three cameras, two stationary, and one in motion, a basic dolly we set up using a board perched on the arms of a wheelchair. We had to work quickly as we only had use of the studio for the length of the class period. However, by the time we broke we had plenty of footage. I asked another classmate, Carlo Kamin, to edit, and by the time he put together our music video, we were pleasantly shocked by how well it had turned out. Unlike “Regendered” which bore the ineradicable stretch marks of our firstborn, this sophomore effort appeared positively professional. I gave it a name, “Ma Rainey’s Lesbian Licks,” and sent it out on the festival circuit. It garnered 18 acceptances, including spots at the relatively prestigious Black and queer festivals, Frameline, the London LGBT Film Festival and the Pan African Film Festival. As you might imagine, this early success completely skewed my sense of what was possible in the film world. I tripped blithely from one non-commercial project to the next, ignoring licensing conventions that would have quickly ballooned the cost of my historical docs beyond affordability. I continued to excavate the Queer Harlem Renaissance, and because I was tilling relatively virgin soil, my acceptance rate in film festivals remained high (140 and counting). Once I stumbled on to narrative filmmaking, my ability to keep production costs reasonable flew out the window, but I had already been infected. Another story for another time. And so Shoga Films was launched. I didn’t know it at the time, but my little film endeavor would eventually grow to take the lion’s share of my time and energy. This monthly newsletter is but one of the results. I turned 75 last month, and I’m more prolific now than at any time in my previous life. I’m not sure anybody cares, but it keeps me out of trouble and an assisted living facility. Of course I was way to old to embark upon another career, but my life has gave me one attitudinal gift that has served me well — I don’t know when to quit. -- Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, A Catastrophic Start SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

A White Jewish Woman In Rebellion Makes Queer Film History “They want to keep you in that little world where they can control you. That's where the money comes from." Norman Mailer, at the height of his fame in the 1950s, declared that the one insupportable persona for him was to be "a nice Jewish boy." His lifelong rebellion against his middle-class upbringing produced, amongst many other writings, "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster." This 1957 essay is now something of an embarrassment as its championing of "Negro culture" was posited as a liberating defiance of the stifling morality and conformity of the Eisenhower era. Beatniks and hipsters took their cues from "the best minds ... dragging themselves through the Negro streets, looking for an angry fix." There was a distaff side to this as well, viz. Hettie Jones, Marilyn Hacker, and l'enfant terrible of independent film, Shirley Clake, nee Shirley Brimberg, daughter of a multimillionaire Polish-Jewish immigrant who made his fortune in manufacturing. Her most important films dealt with a seamy New York slice of Black life (The Connection, The Cool World, and Portrait of Jason.) She wrote, "I identified with black people because I couldn't deal with the woman question and I transposed it. I could understand very easily the black problems, and I somehow equated them to how I felt. When I did The Connection, which was about junkies, I knew nothing about junk and cared less. It was a symbol of people who are on the outside. I always felt alone and on the outside of the culture that I was in." Through her work with this Black demimonde, she got to know a fascinating Black raconteur, hustler, sex worker, and houseboy to the wealthy, who renamed himself Jason Halliday. She persuaded him to come to her room at the storied Chelsea Hotel. She filmed him for twelve hours, cinema verité style, as he raffishly, then bitterly recounts his life "gettin over on old massa" before dissolving into a throbbing dung heap of misery thanks to the alcohol and weed he consumed as the hours passed and the camera turned. At his messiest and most vulnerable, Clarke and her crew throw insults and accusatory questions at him, seemingly to make the pile of pain and self-pity writhe higher. The edited result became Portrait of Jason, the first feature-length film to put a Black gay character at its center. This was so radical and out-of-left-field for American culture and Black gay culture that.it barely made a dent and was thought to be lost for a number of years. It's been meticulously restored and can be streamed on Kanopy, but it doesn't really get the commentary it deserves and even less love. How can you love a train wreck? How can you love this pathetic, deluded, unhappy man who has no filter and rips himself open to a world that would hardly have found anything positive about a Black gay sex worker and servant? (Remember that 1967 was also the year that Sidney Poiter's super clean and handsome Dr. Prentice barely squeaked into the good graces of his white fiancée's liberal parents in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?) Does this stand at the head of Black queer representation in film? Can't we just fast forward to Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston (1987) or Marlon Rigg's Tongues Untied (1989)? The answer is "yes" if we make the argument that only films made by Black gay filmmakers carry sufficient authenticity to launch a tradition. (But then what do we do with Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning?) Life is messy; film history is messy. Portrait of Jason is not a blackface production -- to be simply condemned and "canceled." It raises serious and complex issues. The film itself exposes the artificiality and manipulation of cinema verité. The question of who controls Jason's story is a vexing and probably irresolvable one. And yet Jason does tell his story. He has wit and intelligence and gives us a glimpse into a world that would have been as foreign to white heterosexual viewers as a Martian landscape. In spite of his anger and self-pity, he gets some zingers in, for sure. "White people... they love you when you're down and out. Then they can help you. Makes them feel good." Although Jason recognizes his manifold failures, he rather touchingly believes he may have the talent and drive to become a cabaret singer. What he settles for, even after the gaudy breakdown on camera, is what the film gives him, his 15 minutes of fame. Of course, that too was a poisoned gift. He hoped the film would launch his career; it didn't. (Compare what Grey Gardens did for Little Edie Beale.) He became homeless later and felt abandoned by the same people who celebrated the film. "It made me famous and what did I get for it?" Portrait of Jason did nothing for Jason Halliday. On a macro level, it was a landmark of documentary filmmaking. As for gay Black culture -- an out version of which was all but invisible (and had been for decades) -- Jason Halliday had his snap queen moments, and they are part of the record. "I've been through it all, baby ... and I've still got my pearls on!" Is this Black resilience? Is this gay resilience? Is this intersectional resilience? O snap! --Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in At 54, I Hit My First Film Festival Entry Out of the Ballpark SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

This was not the world Emma Lazarus grew up in, but this was the world her Jewish identity moved her to embrace. You don't recognize the title "The New Colossus." You probably haven't heard of Emma Lazarus. But by God!, you've heard these lines -- and more than once! “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Odds are you didn't know that Emma Lazarus, almost forgotten now, was a famous poet in her day, an anomaly in the 19th century world of letters for being not only female but Jewish. And it was because she was Jewish that she was persuaded, somewhat against her will ("I don't work for hire") to compose a sonnet in 1883 as donation to an auction conducted by the "Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty." Bartholdi's statue had been completed in France for some time, but the deal was that the United States should pay for her pedestal, and New Yorkers were laggard in their response. From her biography, you would not have predicted that Emma Lazarus would become a vocal advocate for the Eastern European Jewish refugees who flooded into the country after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. *Those* Jews -- Yiddish-speaking, impoverished, medieval in clothes, appearance, and attitude -- impressed themselves as the template for Jews in America -- much to the dismay of the older, way more assimilated populations of German Jews who arrived in the 1840s and Sephardic Jews whose presence predated the Republic itself. Born in 1849, Emma grew up in a life of privilege as part of a wealthy Sephardic Jewish family, a bona fide member of American Jewish nobility. (Her father, Moses Lazarus, reaped part of his fortune as a sugar refiner, which entangled his wealth in the institution of Caribbean slavery, but let us only make note of that and move on.) Emma grew up with little awareness or understanding of her heritage and successfully integrated into Christian society. Though she was personally spared from explicit discrimination, Emma was regularly referred to as “the Jewess” by her Christian friends. As she later wrote in a letter to a friend, “I am perfectly conscious that… contempt and hatred underlies the general tone of the community towards us.” During the 1870s, Emma made her reputation as a writer on European themes with only occasional forays into condemnations of Christian antisemitism. The Russian pogroms unleashed by the assassination of Tsar Alexander II lit the match that inflamed Emma's Jewish identity. Eastern European Jews fled to America. Month after month, over 2,000 arrived at the New York processing facility for immigrants . They were penniless, desperate, homeless. Before long, Castle Garden was over capacity, and New York City officials opened an old hospital building on Ward Island to house them. Emma visited Ward Island and exposed their desperate living conditions. She volunteered for the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society and taught English. She donated money. She set up job training and education for the refugees. She raised money, both at home and in Europe. She criticized American Jews for not doing enough to support the refugees. And she was instrumental in the founding of the Hebrew Technical Institute of New York. On the literary front, she trumpeted her new-found ethnic identity by naming her 1882 collection of poetry, Songs of a Semite. So when, the following year, she was asked to donate a poem to aid the erection of "Lady Liberty," she wrote instead a sonnet to "the Mother of Exiles." That was not what the creators of the new colossus that was to stand at the entrance of New York harbor had in mind. Auguste Bartholdi had intended his work to inspire the ideal of liberty — a beacon shining out around the world. Emma's poem transformed the flame of liberty into a torch of welcome. "I lift my lamp beside the golden door." This was not the work of a day -- nor even a decade. The Statue of Liberty was unveiled in 1886; Emma died of Hodgkins Lymphoma, age 38, the year after. At the behest of a group of friends and civic leaders, a bronze plaque of "The New Colossus" was placed on the pedestal in 1903. In time the sonnet effected a complete shift of the statue's meaning in the American narrative. It glorified us as a nation of immigrants, a nation who welcomed immigrants. The fact that this literary miracle was brought about by "a Jewess" whose advocacy of her tempest-tost people trumped her class and privilege is inconvenient in these xenophobic times, but no attempt at erasure or historical revision can entirely snuff out the Statue's light. O! and as for the "queer," that is the subject of another day. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Our previous #QueerHarlemRenaissance short, #CongoCabaret , depicted a gay-friendly cabaret described in the 1928 novel, Home to Harlem. I now want to turn my attention to the other important gay prose piece coming out of the Renaissance, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade.” SL&J was written by a talented young dilettante by the name of #RichardBruceNugent , the most openly gay writer of the Renaissance. His story is the first positive depiction of same-sex desire in American letters. For that reason alone it is remarkable, but it’s also beautifully written. As a rediscovered classic of early gay writing, it has been cited, mentioned and featured in all sorts of ways. Rodney Evans‘ film Brother to Brother. #IsaacJulien #LookingForLangston . #indiefilms #seedandspark When we shot "Congo Cabaret," we interviewed the actors about the project, and they all professed astonishment that there was a queer presence in the Harlem Renaissance. "I didn't know," was the refrain. We have clips from interviews with Karen Obilom (@karenobilom), Darryl Stephens (@darrylstephens), Russell Richardson (@iamrussellr), Julio Marcelino (@juliobyme), Kevin Daniels (@kevindaniels27), and Parisa Fitz-Henley (@parisafitzhenley. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

The steady blows of African Americans being killed with seeming impunity by white cops and racist vigilantes don't let up even during the time of COVID-19. On February 23, Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed by two white residents of Georgia while jogging through the streets of their neighborhood. When a video of the murder went viral on May 5, condemnations from numerous religious leaders, politicians, athletes, and other celebrities forced an arrest of the perpetrators. There was outrage, there was hurt, but the streets remained quiet. On March 16, Breonna Taylor was gunned down in her apartment by plainclothes Louisville police pursuing a false lead in the infamous war on drugs. There was little reaction to Breonna’s killing until a Black Lives Matter activist posted about her death on May 15. There was outrage, there was hurt, but the streets remained quiet. On May 25, George Floyd was asphyxiated in broad daylight by a Minneapolis police officer pressing his knee on the black man’s neck while he moaned, “I can’t breathe.” Videos of the eight minutes of horrific inhumanity went viral, and the streets exploded. A population disproportionately ravaged by COVID-19 could take no more. No American remains untouched by this nightmare. There are two clear sides, and Shoga Films is on the side of the protestors. This time the protestors are not just African Americans. But ringing words of solidarity mean nothing. THERE IS ONLY ACTION! Black people do not have to be told this; allies and well-meaning sympathizers of other races must learn this lesson. Sympathy without action is a fraud; tears without action are insulting. There are many actions from marching in the streets; supporting Black Lives Matter; challenging, even as a white person, why there are no people of color sitting on the panel of the job you are interviewing for. Our action, as an organization, is a significant contribution to Black Lives Matter and the National Black Justice Coalition. There will be other actions, but this is our stake now. Those who do not act let the racist current of American history flow and flow and flow. There will be more murders, and no one who hasn’t acted in this time of clear choice can say, “I am not guilty." SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts