It’s July 1967. The Summer of Love, right? All across America, young people are smoking dope, holding Be-Ins, and growing hair at a rate previously unobserved in human history. The strains of Sgt. Pepper waft through the air, and the universal victory of peace and love is just a tie-dyed T-shirt away.
That, of course, is the white privilege version of history, as Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit vividly reminds us. 1969 was dubbed the “Days of Rage” after Chicago cops started cracking the skulls of white college students, but the burned-out neighborhoods of Watts and Newark testified to a different, more personal kind of rage—one based not on opposition to foreign wars, but to racial injustice at home. It’s almost as if there were two Americas. Imagine that.