Two women, a message, and a question back.
A note before this one: both women here talk about people being killed in their neighbourhood, and about guns, and it stays where they put it.
Three minutes on a street in Philadelphia with two women who take the camera on together, one of them from North Philly. It opens mid sentence with a message aimed at the whole city. “As black people, we need to look out for each other”, the first says. The second names what she is talking about: “a lot of killing, a lot of stray bullets going on.” Between them they land on the same instruction: “Start fighting and put the guns down.”
Asked what it is like being a black woman in Philadelphia, the answer comes twice over. “It’s tough. It’s hard”, says one, and the other takes it somewhere else: “At the end of the day, we strong black women out here. You can never break a black woman. A single black woman, black mother, you can’t break.” On whether black men are doing their part she gives credit and a bill in the same line, “Some of them are. I’m going to give you your props, but some of y’all gotta do better”, then addresses them directly: “As a Black man, you gotta do better. You a king. Do better.” She has skin in it. “I got a son. I’m raising a king.”
Her message to young men in the city is a refusal of limits: “Don’t let nobody tell you you can’t do shit. You can do whatever the fuck you want to do.” The other woman keeps hers to four words, repeated: “Put the guns down. That’s my message to all the young men out there in Philadelphia.”
Then the format flips and they are asked for a question of their own, one to put to the rest of the city. It takes a minute to arrive: “if you could change your environment, what would you change your environment to be?” She explains why she picked it. “A lot of people, I know a lot of people wish they could change their environment and they can’t, you know.”
She is from North Philly, and asked her favourite thing about it she starts with “There is none.” Pressed, she finds three: “the barbecue during the summertime”, “The music”, and “The blocks popping. Everybody lit, having fun.” Then the qualifier: “But other than that, it’s just a lot of killing, a lot of Fighting and shit like that.”
Community she defines in three goes, “Natural”, then “People coming together”, then “As one.” Asked for a moment in Philadelphia that felt like that, she cannot find one at first, then does: “people marching on the streets saying like, stop the violence and shit like that.” Who was marching, she explains, was families. “people die often in Philly. So people, families come out and they protest for their family members.” She has come across a few of them.