Who is Born Free
My laptop screen goes black at 8 minutes and 49 seconds, keep in mind the official video is 9 minutes and 6 seconds long. For the remaining 17 seconds I am confronted with a shocked reflection of myself . My face is uneasy and my jaw is dropped midway. My eyebrows create a furrowed zig-zag and I frighteningly whisper “holy shit”.
I’d like to say it was similar to an expression I had the night Donald Trump was elected president.
MIA’s Born Free video is a high tension militarized raid on a group of red haired young men- the smallest boy being around the age of 8. The short film begins in a desolate cityscape of what looks to be a dilapidated apartment building in Los Angeles. Dressed in black military outfits, police officials force their way up the building- stopping on every floor terrorizing residents left and right. One minute into the video, a woman is punched to the ground and beaten repeatedly. Scene after scene military personnel force themselves into the civilians apartments, bashing down doors, while ruthlessly searching for their target. They finally find a young red headed man hiding in a shower who defiantly stares dead straight into the eyes of the policeman that finds him. Shoved into the back of a van, the young man is now surrounded by men who all have white skin and flaming red hair, just like him.
At this point the scene looked all too familiar. A group of similar looking men all dumped into a van being shipped off to some barren desert in the middle of nowhere. A deportation of a minority group that look a little too illegal to be in whatever dystopian world MIA had created. This draws a parallel to our current social climate in which President elect Donald Trump wants away with all illegal immigrants and refugees in the U.S.
As the van of police and red haired men leave the city, three similar looking men run out into the street and begin to throw objects at the van. One of the rebel red haired men wears a keffiyeh scarf around his mouth-further painting the picture of the “other” in the video. The scarf immediately stood out to me as a symbol of Arab resistance, however it is commonly mistaken as an article of terrorist garb. The shaping of the terrorist body by media has displaced the essence of who and what is illegal in a country founded on white supremacy and racism. MIA’s obvious twist of the victim in her video allows mainstream white audiences to see the direct harm of illegal deportation and unjust persecution done to a body that is not Latino or Middle Eastern- but instead white. This not only shifts the perspective of who is being targeted but puts into question: why are we so affected by watching this?
I personally do not watch highly violent television, so watching the little boy get shot was the hardest thing for me to see. As a person of color, the injustices done to minority groups and marginalized people of the African American, Muslim, and Latin American communities have disheartened me beyond belief. Unfortunately the desensitization of these violent crimes among people of color have taken its toll. It seems like everyday an innocent colored life is taken and their stories are splayed across numerous media outlets. The outright political message of MIA’s Born Free questions the institutionalized violence of our government and militarized corporations. The violent nature of the video is highly disturbing and confronts the concept of who we projecting as the enemy and why we feel they are the enemy- a hate fostered on the basis of an “illegal” appearance. The destiny of the men in the MIA’s video are subjected to a violent execution in which a young boy is blatantly shot in the head and another child is blown up by a landmine. Police authorities yell and chase the red haired man we first saw hiding in the shower. He is pummeled and beaten mercilessly, a fate too real for many people who wish they were born free.
