Week 2 Response - Olivia Brunner-Gaydos

As I read through and watched the video this week, I began to fully appreciate how art can show social movements through such various viewpoints and communicate in so many ways. Alice Bag is first introduced to the idea that policemen aren't always the hero's when it comes to people from racial minorities when her father took her to what was supposed to be a peaceful march to protest the Vietnam war; "Throughout my early childhood, policemen had been the knights in shining armor who rescued my mother from my father's vicious attacks. In my eyes, they had always lived up to their motto, "To Protect and Serve." That day, I saw my knights like the other people in my life: Their capacity for good was matched with their capacity for evil." She writes about this experience in her book Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, a Chicana Punk Story. As someone who has never had to experience this moment of realizing I was part of a minority group, I appreciate being able to feel hers. In Bag's video "White Justice" I again saw a reference to the police brutality and discrimination Chicana's face. This time she uses the art by pairing words about what happened and how it made her feel and photographs of the actual thing happening. Looking at pieces like these allows me to appreciate the different ways social justice movements can be described and translated through art.