Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America: Show, Tell and Engage

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Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America is a provocative and treasured theatrical documentary by Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler. The first part of its title could be seen as an answer, or a fix, to what we hear so often in racist crime coverage on TV, someone saying, ritually, it’s not who we are. But the content of the films is not at all ritual. It’s a unique, eloquent and sincere response to the challenge of reframing our discussion on a topic that numbs us with repetition.

The man at the center of the column, Jeffery Robinson, is a former deputy legal director for the ACLU. At first, the camera finds him on stage in 2018 at the New Yorks Town Hall Theater, giving a presentation that combines calm instruction and passionate advocacy with a sort of compelling directing fueled by the impulse to show to demonstrate, to the help with videos, photos and history. documents, how and why racism, as he puts it, is our shared history.

The filmmakers whose father, civil rights attorney William Kunstler, was best known for championing the Chicago Seven, have organized their production around the Mr. Robinsons presentation, which he has given several times since his days as a criminal defense attorney in Seattle. In some ways, the results cover familiar ground. Mr Robinson, who is black, interviews the mother of Eric Garner, the black man who died on Staten Island in 2014 after a New York City cop held him in a prohibited strangulation. He recounts highlights of current events of racial conflicts; visit the motel in Memphis, Tenn., where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated; speaks to a stern-faced resident of Charleston, SC, who insists the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery.

Photo by Jeffery Robinson: Sony Pictures Classics

But it is Mr. Robinson himself who gives the film its distinction. Alone on stage, his eyes shining behind rimless glasses, his welcoming smile and his voice a supple instrument of warmth, street, ironic humor or quiet fury, he insists that slavery has everything to do. with the civil war, then evokes the fate, and number of slaves, with instructive details. One of them concerns the weight of cotton. In 1860, he says, just before the start of the war America was producing 2.3 billion pounds of it. If any of you have ever held a freshly picked cotton ball in your hands, says Robinson, you’ll know it weighs next to nothing. Having engaged our imaginations, he leans on this concept of insubstantiality with the gravity of another vast workforce drawn from the four million slaves living in the South at that time.

Films are seldom capable of changing mentalities, and Mr. Robinson and his directors clearly know that. They also know that the last thing Americans want in this frightening time of chronic inflammation is to be lectured about their nation’s racist past or its tumultuous present. What this film does best is to offer, sometimes in a playful way and sometimes not, new perspectives on the central problem of our common history.

The performer on stage gives a presentation strictly speaking, but also a virtuoso performance which illustrates unconscious prejudices with a clever play on words which separates the colors from the words which describe them. He recommends going to the Harvard University website and taking an implied association test; when he picked it up, he found that he had, of all things, a negative impression of black men; in other words, of itself. And Mr. Robinson is asking us, begging us, in fact to think of white privilege in a different way. It doesn’t mean you haven’t worked hard, he said; it doesn’t mean that you haven’t overcome the obstacles. It means you travel the world differently from Blacks and Browns in this country.

Write to Joe Morgenstern at [email protected]

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