Yesterday, news broke that Brian Encinia, the Texas State Trooper who arrested Sandra Bland on bullshit charges, triggering the chain of events resulting in her death, had been officially fired. (He’d previously been charged with perjury.) It was the negligible sliver of a silver lining meant to simulate something akin to justice. It’s not even close, of course.
Last year, singer-songwriter Lorine Chia released a cover of Billie Holiday’s classic anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit,” a nod to the never ending relevance of the song’s lyrics. Just two days before the Encinia firing Chia dropped her new video “I Want to Live.” The fact of it coming just days ahead of the firing could be considered prescient – further underscored by the imagery in the brief, animated clip. In it, a young black woman restlessly tosses and turns on her bed, the bird’s eye view of her room framing her isolation and depression. As the camera moves from a newspaper headline (“Eric Garner’s Last Words: ‘I Can’t Breathe’”) to a TV flashing images of civil unrest in Ferguson, the clip makes clear the psychic and emotional toll of “being woke.”
As Chia sings “I just want to live / never fear…,” we cut to a young black man running from a police car. His fleeing form gives way to the animated Chia leaving flowers on the spot where he dies from the cop’s bullets. Making the connection to Bland (and other black women who are often underrepresented in conversations about police brutality) even more clear, Chia is later pulled over by a cop car as she drives from the shrine. Her eyes dart anxiously from side to side as the cop approaches her car from behind. The powerfully drawn and is short, powerful, depressing, and tragically timeless.
Co-directed by The DreamBear and Daniel Cordero.
Cover image courtesy thegirlsare.com
