News
Page 8
Street Roots • Sept. 30-Oct. 6, 2016
Street Roots • Sept. 30-Oct. 6, 2016
Page 9
News
The screening
BY SARAH HANSELL
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Social Justice Fund NW’s Gender Justice
Learning Group is a fundraising and learning group
that organizes around gender justice. Social Justice
Fund NW is working to “democratize fundraising,”
Riley said, by engaging volunteers from diverse
backgrounds to organize to raise money for their
grantees, rather than the money being supplied
and controlled by a board of directors.
This film falls in line with the fund’s belief that
“race and class are core pieces to thinking about
liberation,” Riley said, as it explores the NJ4’s
intersecting identities, and the multiple levels
where these identities were put under fire.
And as social media and technology have brought
attention to police brutality against the black
community, this film also raises awareness of the
many different systems that conspire against
people of color.
“I think part of what makes it really relevant
right now is there’s this heightened awareness, not
just locally but nationally, around how police,
among many other aspects of the justice system, as
well as many other aspects of our modern life —
how these systems that we have set up are just
really rigged against people of color, people who
don’t have a ton of wealth, people who are
different, people who do not conform,” Riley said.
en years ago, Patreese Johnson, a black
19-year-old from New Jersey, was a self
described homebody and a lesbian who was
not yet out to her family. On a hot night in August,
she and a group of six friends, all lesbians, decided
to have a night out in the West Village, a New York
neighborhood known then to be a safe haven for
LGBTQ people.
As a group of young women out at night, it was
not surprising that a man called out to them and
harassed them in the street, making sexual
remarks.
It was also not surprising that when they
rejected his advances and began to walk away, he
became angry.
What is still surprising to Johnson is just how
angry he got.
After telling him they were gay, he lunged at
Johnson’s best friend, Renata Hill. Johnson had a
pen knife for protection and stabbed at him in the
abdomen. A couple of bystanders jumped in to
assist them but left before police came and
arrested the seven women.
■Four of them, dubbed the NJ4, chose to fight the
charges - gang assault, assault and attempted
murder. None of them had records.
All four lost.
The film “Out in the Night” follows their stories
in and after prison and the miscarriages of justice
that put them there in the first place. It will be
screened Oct. 27 at Portland’s Clinton Street
Theater, hosted by Social Justice Fund NW’s
Gender Justice Learning Group.
T
Who has the right to self-defense?
Although the events in the film might be
infuriating, even shocking, to white viewers, the
experiences of these women are no anomaly.
“I think really this story is more common than
people realize,” said Dianne Riley, Oregon director
of Social Justice Fund NW. “It’s not something that
is super visible, certainly not in pop culture....
People are not really truly conscious of how
common it is for women of color, queer women of
color, non-conforming — especially around gender —
folks, people who are poor, to be really targeted as
perpetrators, instantly identified as problematic
and suspect, and for us to not be able to get what
most people would consider basic services.”
When the NJ4 went to trial, they were tried as a
group. They were brought in front of an all-white
jury, who had more than likely seen their faces
plastered across tabloids labeling them a “gang of
killer lesbians” and a “wolf pack” and a judge who,
Johnson said, argued that self-defense was not a
believable defense in court.
And yet these women did not think they had any
choice other than self-defense.
“If we would have chosen to call 911 instead of
defending ourselves, one of us would be dead,” Hill
said in the film.
Johnson said she grew up being harassed by
police officers and witnessing police brutality and
street crimes in her neighborhood. Her brother
was shot and killed by a police officer when she
was 11.
“That night happened, none of us really thought
about calling the police,” Johnson said.
Johnson and her friends didn’t question that they
The present and the future
The film “Out in the Night” follows the stories of Venice Brown (from left), Terrain Dandridge, Patrese Johnson and Renata Hill.
In their defense
The film ‘Out in the Night’ tells the stories of four young, LGBTQ women of color
who protected themselves from violence only to be prosecuted, maligned and imprisoned
had the inalienable right to defend their own bodies
from attack. Yet it was their self-defense that cost
them the years they each spent behind bars.
“I think that self-defense is something that is not
used to defend the people that it should,” said blair
dorosh-walther, the director of “Out in the Night”
“For me, it’s very clearly a matter of self-defense,
and I think that brings up issues of who has the
right to defend themselves.”
The day after it happened, dorosh-walther heard
about the assault in the news and was involved as
an activist right away. But she didn’t think she, as a
white filmmaker, should be the one to direct a film
about these women.
Two years later, the women’s appeals were
approaching, the media coverage was dying down,
and she began to rethink making a’films She - ,
reached out to the women’s families and the
women themselves through letters.
“I don’t totally believe that just anybody should
be able to tell anybody’s story, but I also don’t
believe that you can only tell certain stories,”
dorosh-walther said. “So with this, we kind of
clicked. It felt right”
The film follows the stories of the four women -
Johnson, Hill, Venice Brown and Terrain Dandridge
- as, one by one, they are released from jail.
Johnson was released last, in 2014.
Safety in a rigged system
“Out in the Night” paints a picture of the
. hostility these four women faced from the media,
the justice system and the prison system. It depicts
the hostility they faced on the streets of a space
that used to be explicitly for them.
“To me it was really important to talk about the
queer civil rights-ish movement that was taking place
being co-opted by marriage, when walking down the
street, safety is a really big issue for many people in
the queer community,” dorosh-walther said.
Johnson and her friends knew the West Village
as a safe space for LGBTQ folks — especially
LGBTQ youths. The West Village was where
LGBTQ youths who had been kicked out of their
homes would go to try to find safety and
community. But gentrification had begun to make
the West Village a tourist destination the city of
New York had a vested interest in policing and
“cleaning up,” Johnson said.
New York’s “reputation is the city that never
sleeps,” Johnson said. “Are you kidding me? People
try to say you shouldn’t have been out there. Are
you kidding me? But it’s cool for another tourist
from another country to be out there until 3 or 4
o’clock in the morning going to a club, right? But
we can’t go out onto the pier and watch the water
and laugh and giggle.”
Johnson doesn’t go to the West Village much
anymore. But the last time she did, she didn’t see
people of color on the pier like she used to.
This sentiment hits close to home in Portland,
which not only has been called the whitest city in
the U.S. but is also considered one of the most
gentrified. People of color and people in poverty
are being pushed out of their neighborhoods and
farther east, where housing is more affordable.
All four women are now in different stages of
working and going to school. Renata Hill is working
on her master’s in social work. Johnson, whose
felony has made it difficult to procure a job, is
attending a new re-entry program. All four women
struggle or have struggled with housing and getting
jobs because of their records.
Yet throughout it all, Johnson stays tirelessly
positive. While in prison, she became an advocate
for women who had been convicted for defending
themselves from domestic violence. She and Hill
travel to show the film and talk about their
experiences and their activism.
Johnson’s dream is to one day open a
therapeutic spa that could serve as a safe space for
all people, especially for women and LGBTQ
people, and offer different methods of therapy and
meditation to help let go of stress.
“I’m just the seed of many seeds that’s trying to
make change,” she said.
Johnson said that she doesn’t regret going to
prison, as it opened her eyes to so many social
issues, which kick-started her activism. Yet she no
longer feels safe on the streets at night, and she no
longer feels safe with police or the justice system.
“That’s always the question I ask myself now,”
Johnson said. “Do I fight back or I don’t? If I fight
back, I go to jail. If I don’t fight back, I’m basically,
you know, I’m going to die.”
But that night, those four women did fight back.
They fought back against someone who attacked
them for saying no. They fought back against
racially charged accusations and homophobic
depictions in the media. They fought back in
prison, advocating for others. And they continue to
fight back, despite the odds. Because even though
systems on every level are telling her she doesn’t
have the right - ate locking her up for exercising it
- Patreese Johnson knows that she does.
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