During the past year, the gap between America in theory and America in practice grew painfully apparent, even to people who never gave the discrepancies much thought. To be aware of that gap between the promise and the reality, and the terrible consequences for millions of lives, is the message of Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America.
The documentary is centered around a presentation at New York’s Town Hall by Jeffrey Robinson, ACLU’s deputy legal counsel. As a graduate of Marquette University and Harvard Law School, Robinson received a fine education, yet he says he never learned much about the history of Black America. Quoting George Orwell, Robinson reminds the audience that who controls the past controls the future, and who controls the present controls the past.
Robinson shares a personal memory as the film cuts away to the Loraine Hotel in Memphis. He stands outside, looks up at the doorway to Room 306 where Martin Luther King Jr. died in 1968 and shoots a glance to the building across the way where the assassin waited with his rifle. Robinson was 11 at the time; his dad took him to King’s rally in Memphis to support a sanitation workers strike. Archival footage shows police sweeping in, wielding billy clubs. One Black protester died.
“We were at a tipping point,” Robinson says, back at Town Hall. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the increasing momentum of King’s struggle and then—assassination, upheaval and the election of Richard Nixon whose War on Drugs disproportionately targeted Blacks and other minorities. After taking two steps forward, America took a step back and stood still until Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crimes Act (1994) spurring the mass incarceration of Black men.
Robinson crisscrosses between key events in history, including the post-Civil War Reconstruction that began to lift the freed slaves onto a level playing field—until white Southern resistance and dwindling support in the white North reversed the progress that had been made. In the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson decision, the U.S. Supreme Court declared separate but equal as the law of the land. Sadly, it was never equal and the court waited until 1954 to reverse itself with Brown vs. Board of Education.
U.S. history bristles with painful episodes that show how white supremacy was embedded in the country’s institutions and became the fallback attitude of many Americans—the “unconscious bias” tugging at us, shaping perceptions of people who don’t see themselves as racist. Cut to the Manhattan apartment building where Robinson speaks with a Black man who was nearly arrested on moving day after someone in the building called 911 and reported him as an armed intruder. His crime was that his complexion triggered the unconscious bias, and fear, of a neighbor.
Robinson is calm but furious as he martials fact and anecdote with a plea for changing the way we understand our society and ourselves. He refuses to demonize. “People aren’t just good or bad. People are many things… countries aren’t just one thing either,” he says, wisely. Like everywhere and everyone, America’s mixed record of great deeds and misdeeds should not prevent us from reaching a better place.
Who We Are will stream as part of the Milwaukee Film Festival, May 6-20. For more information, visit mkefilm.org.
