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“In case you’ve ever owned a slave, please elevate your hand,” Jeffery Robinson asks a stay viewers in the beginning of “Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America,” a searing documentary primarily based on a lecture he’s spent a decade perfecting.
Clearly, no one within the auditorium raises a hand. That is 2018 New York Metropolis! However the few seconds that observe the query are in all probability the one probability these viewers members should put far between themselves and the nation’s sorry document of racial oppression. No, explains Robinson, slavery will not be our fault. However it's “our shared historical past.”
After which Robinson, a longtime prison protection lawyer and former deputy authorized director of the American Civil Liberties Union, launches his harrowing journey by means of centuries of institutionalized racism. Alongside the way in which he factors out each the well-known (the plantations, the lynchings, the 1921 Tulsa Race Bloodbath) and the much less broadly recognized (the troubling third verse of the Star-Spangled Banner, or the marketed provide by future President Andrew Jackson of $10 additional for any 100 lashes given his escaped slave). Irrespective of how a lot you assume you already know, you’re certain to study new issues from “Who We Are,” directed by Emily and Sarah Kunstler. And to be surprised, in some unspecified time in the future.
How did this lecture come about? Robinson explains that he grew to become a father in 2011, when his sister-in-law died and her son, then 13, moved in. All of a sudden, Robinson wanted to show a Black teen about racism. In educating himself, he says, he was surprised by what he himself — fortunate sufficient to have a stellar training, together with a Harvard regulation diploma — didn’t know.
He started sharing his findings wherever he might — in neighborhood facilities, church buildings, convention rooms. The administrators, after listening to him communicate, steered a film. Their ensuing movie is anchored by the 2018 lecture in New York’s historic City Corridor and crammed out with archival footage, images and current-day interviews with the likes of 107-year-old Lessie Benningfield Randle, one of many final survivors of the Tulsa bloodbath, and Gwen Carr, mom of Eric Garner, whose demise from a police chokehold grew to become a rallying cry for Black Lives Matter. Robinson additionally argues briefly with a person holding a Accomplice flag, who insists the Civil Conflict had nothing in any respect to do with slavery.
At a slavery museum in Charleston, South Carolina, Robinson examines two pairs of shackles; one is adult-sized, the opposite toddler-sized. We additionally see an oak “hanging tree” — and later, images of white People standing subsequent to the our bodies of Black individuals who have been lynched, a sight Robinson says was as soon as “regular and accepted” in America.
However regardless of the numerous references to painful intervals in U.S. historical past, it’s additionally the well positioned sprinklings of Robinson’s personal life expertise that assist personalize the proceedings and provides the movie its emotional wallop.
Numerous these moments happen in Memphis, the place Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated but in addition the place Robinson grew up. He travels again to his hometown, the place, he tells us, his dad and mom tried to purchase a home in a white neighborhood however have been turned away, till white associates went and acquired it for them. Then, when the household moved in, a neighbor confirmed up with freshly baked chocolate chip cookies for “the woman of the home” — however turned and left, cookies in hand, when Robinson’s Black mom got here to the door.
In one other scene, a white highschool pal confesses he by no means instructed Robinson that they’d all as soon as been denied entry to a basketball recreation due to Robinson’s race; a pastor intervened, with out Robinson ever realizing. Each males are diminished to tears on the story.
Robinson closes on a be aware of tentative hope. The Black Lives Matter protests united individuals of all races in American streets, he observes: “The opportunity of radical change is within the air.“ However he additionally warns: “The issues they’re saying about Black Lives Matter immediately are the very same issues they stated about Martin Luther King within the ’60s.”
If the format of a lecture is inherently limiting, the administrators do an excellent job of weaving a compelling visible — and emotional — expertise. One can solely hope they, and Robinson, get the extensive viewers the movie deserves (the documentary is a part of a broader instructional initiative, the Who We Are Undertaking).
Robinson’s last level is that we’re at one other tipping level — simply as we have been within the late ‘60s. Will we fall again once more, he asks?
“Or, will this era resolve to do one thing completely different?”
“Who We Are,” a Sony Photos Classics launch, has been rated PG-13 by the Movement Image Affiliation of America for “thematic content material, disturbing pictures, violence and robust language — all involving racism.“ Working time: 117 minutes. Three and a half stars out of 4.
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MPAA definition of PG-13: Mother and father strongly cautioned. Some materials could also be inappropriate for youngsters beneath 13.