Steve
Challenging ‘Who We Are’
A lawyer’s descent into the dark history of anti-Black racism in America is a painful, illuminating watch. Screening soon at VIFF.
Dorothy Woodend is culture editor of The Tyee. Reach her here.
George Orwell’s famous statement from his dystopic masterpiece 1984 occurs about midway through the new documentary Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America.
It is so pertinent, it’s almost painful.
Who We Are takes as its foundation a lecture about the history of racism in the U.S. given by a man named Jeffery Robinson. Over the past 10 years, Robinson has offered his talk in lecture halls, community centres, churches and university campuses.
When lawyer and filmmaker Sarah Kunstler attended one of Robinson’s events in New York City, it changed her life. She convinced her sister Emily, also a filmmaker, that Robinson’s story had the makings of a feature documentary, and together the group embarked on a journey deep into the darkest heart of American history.
The film is anchored by a presentation given at the New York Town Hall on June 19 — Juneteenth — in 2018, but from there the narrative stretches out, encompassing past, present and future.
Robinson, a former deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, is a gifted speaker, accessible and impassioned in equal measure. As he says in the film, he got a first-class education, studied law at Harvard University and practised as a trial lawyer for 34 years.
But even he was unaware of the many stories in American history that had been carefully excised from common knowledge.
A case in point is the so-called Tulsa Riot, which was in fact a genocide perpetrated on American soil. The exact number of people who died when the Black community of Greenwood, Oklahoma was attacked isn’t clear. In addition to the hundreds of residents who were injured, the victims who perished were dumped in the Arkansas River or buried in mass graves, which were then paved over by an interstate highway.
When a young Black man named Dick Rowland tripped while rushing to catch an elevator and bumped into a white woman, he was accused of assault. Rowland was arrested, and word got out that a lynch party had formed. In response, a group of Black army veterans assembled at the jail to protect the incarcerated Rowland. When violence broke out between the two groups, white and Black, it sparked a firestorm that destroyed an entire community.
Over the course of May 31 to June 1, 1921, armed white mobs attacked Black homes and businesses. Even a plane was hired to drop burning turpentine balls from the air. At the end of the orgy of murder and arson, the community once known “Black Wall Street” was completely obliterated.
In the film, Robinson tours the site with local residents, who explain that the many stone steps that lead to nowhere are the only traces left of the houses where people once lived. In the aftermath of the destruction, the homes were never rebuilt.
Still considered “the single worst incident of racial violence in American history,” the story of Greenwood was largely absent from history books. This kind of erasure is emblematic of the ongoing struggle to face the reality of the country’s birth. A legacy built on the enslavement of African people for the better part of 400 years.
The film mixes the personal and the political with fluid ease, as Robinson talks about his own personal journey. When his sister-in-law died, he adopted her teenage son, and the realities of bringing up a young Black man in America took on an entirely new resonance.
Robinson was 11-years-old when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Robinson’s hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. King was set to present a speech entitled “Why America May Go to Hell,” but he was killed before he gave it.
As Robinson recounts, prior to King’s murder the country had arguably reached a tipping point. The Civil Rights movement had successfully lobbied for desegregating schools, the Freedom Riders had braved violence to bring about change, and voting rights were being enacted.
The death of King arguably robbed the movement of its galvanizing momentum, and what could have been a cultural tipping point in the country’s history never came to be.
It’s this series of possible futures that proves most painful, as every time a progressive cultural shift occurred, something rolled the ball back down the hill, whether it’s Nixon’s war on drugs, used to effectively break apart the counterculture and the Black Power movements, or the current struggle to ensure that the true reality of slavery isn’t taught in American schools.
The continuation of Orwell’s statement, “Who controls the past, controls the future, who controls the present, controls the past,” is effectively where things are at the moment, as the struggle to whitewash history rages on, fought in classrooms, libraries, PTA meetings and the American Senate.
As Robinson explains, when he began to actively research the history of his country, he was shocked by the continued presence of racist history in the form of Confederate statues and the fingerprints of enslaved children left in the bricks used to construct many buildings in Southern towns.
In the centre of Charleston, South Carolina, a massive oak used for lynching still stands. Robinson estimates that more than 4,000 Black people were lynched between 1877 to 1950, their deaths often documented in grainy photographs.
More recent history lives in the hearts and minds of people who lost loved ones. Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner — murdered by police for selling loose cigarettes — explains to Robinson that she’s dedicated her life to ensuring that her son’s name lives on, remembered not just as a victim but as a fully realized human being.
In another interview in the film, Robinson talks to the oldest living survivor of the Tulsa Massacre. Lessie Benningfield Randle was six-years-old when she witnessed first-hand bodies piled in the street. At age 107, her memories are still vivid and bright with pain.
Robinson interweaves his own experience growing up in the South, including when his parents bought a house in a white neighbourhood so that Robinson and his older brother could attend the local Catholic school. On the first night in their new home, Robinson’s father set up a lawn chair in the carport, put a shotgun on his lap and waited until dawn to make certain that nothing happened to his house and family.
As the only two Black children in their elementary school, Robinson and his brother grew up with what he calls “unicorn parents,” loyal friends and a loving family. But even here, racism was active and pernicious.
In a reunion with a pair of childhood friends, the trio remember a basketball game in the neighbouring town of Walls, Mississippi, where Robinson wasn’t allowed in the gym because he was Black. Only the intervention of the school’s pastor ensured that he was allowed to join his teammates and play.
What underpins Robinson’s excoriating takedown of American history isn’t just that many of the tactics currently being implemented in the U.S. aren’t new, but underneath all the politicking is something even grosser. Money was at the root of slavery.
This is probably not a revelation to many, but as Robinson pinpoints the economic underpinnings of the Civil War with acidic precision and a boatload of historical fact, it becomes obscenely apparent that all the high-minded verbiage around the glory of Southern culture was really about protecting the economic benefits that slavery brought.
It’s hard to watch the film and not see shades of the same thing in Canada. Although slavery didn’t form a blood-soaked layer of our national history the way it did in the U.S., the treatment of Indigenous people was no better.
As the echoes of the past and the present volley back and forth, whether another critical juncture will pass — with the U.S. taking a step backwards to antediluvian mode of racial violence and oppression — remains to be seen, but Robinson is hopeful that the next generation might be the one to finally roll the ball over the hill towards a better future.
‘Who We Are’ is playing at the Vancity Theatre in Vancouver as part of its Black History Month programming. More details here.