Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America

Whenever there is a horrifying moment in the United States of America related to race, there sometimes is a knee-jerk reaction to it. "That's not who we are," is more or less the usual refrain. For conservatives, this "isn't who we are" because, regardless of what people of color have told everyone about their experiences, racism is simply a case of a few bad apples. Liberals, however, though they mean well, are often ignorant of history. One would hear a lot of white liberals shout "this isn't who we are!" when the Trump administration would put children in cages, apparently oblivious of the fact that so much of the history of the United States features such ugly episodes. 

Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America is a documentary that aims to tear apart both fallacies. It's a film that is similar to An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary featuring Al Gore's presentation attempting to alarm audiences of the reality of global warming. In a similar style, Who We Are splits between a presentation with a fancy PowerPoint by Jeffrey Robinson, a former deputy director the ACLU and the founder of the Who We Are Project, and personal anecdotes about Robinson's own experiences with racism mixed with interviews with the mothers of Black men killed by the police. Many of these moments, whether they be the interviews with these mothers or Robinson talking with a white coach at his Catholic school who tried to protect him from racism, are powerful, as is much of Robinson's more objective presentation, which details what he calls tipping points, moments when the United States (as he puts it) moved one step forward and three back in terms of racial justice and fairness. For example, Reconstruction and the civil rights laws of the nineteenth century were replaced by Jim Crow, and the gains from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s were diminished by harmful policies that followed, such as the War on Drugs. 

As one can imagine, the documentary very much is a history lesson. On tours, Robinson shows viewers the silent yet horrifying reminders of racism in the country, from the fingerprints of enslaved people in bricks, to trees still standing where Black people were lynched and hanged from, to the steps of what used to be Black Wall Street in Tulsa before the infamous slaughter in 1921. Other usual beats are there, such as the Electoral College's racist origins, the racist lyrics of the "Star-Spangled Banner," The Birth of a Nation, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Fernando Wood, and the fight to remove statues paying tribute to Confederate traitors and slavers. During his presentation, he includes a passage from the South Carolina Slave Code of 1740, which outlined that "the slave may be kept in due subjugation and obedience." His point is that the laws of the United States have often been a fundamental component of anti-Black racism in the United States. "The law picked a side," he tells his audience. 

If there is a problem with the film, it is that it is too similar in style to An Inconvenient Truth (so much so that it could have alternatively been titled "An Inconvenient Truth About Racism"). Beyond that, the documentary (like many others similar to it) preaches to the choir. In one scene, Robinson discusses the causes of the Civil War when he sees a pro-Confederate flag rally. Chatting with an older white man, Robinson does circles around him and his lack of logic, to the point where the other man seems to concede that if Robinson were to enslave the white guy, he would be okay with that (as long as he were to be treated "like family"). The white guy is wearing sunglasses, but his facial expression is basically emotionless; it's clear he just wants this to end. Despite likely being exposed to different (and obviously stronger) arguments, the man does not recant his original position. The war was fought because of economic reasons, he maintains, and it was not due to slavery (which was, again according to him, okay in many instances because the enslaved people were often treated as family). Robinson gets back into the vehicle and is completely exhausted. "Facts were not that important to this gentleman," he says. 

But that's a frustrating thing about Who We Are. Few of the many white people who disapprove of Black Lives Matter or the only twenty-five percent of white people who think that people of color are treated more harshly by the police are likely to see this documentary, and those who do are unlikely, I believe, to have their opinions be changed. The movie works for its audience (those who already walk into the film agreeing with Robinson) because these are the arguments that have always worked for this group. For the other group, their arguments are simpler: the United States is not racist—end of discussion. They can hardly be blamed for thinking that; it is, after all, how many of them have been taught to view racism in this nation. Green Book won Best Picture only three years ago because many people (even those infamously pesky liberals in Hollywood) still think that racism only existed in the South, it ended in 1968, and the solution to it is to simply put white people with people of color, and the problems will magically disappear.  

This is probably most notable when Robinson plays excerpts from Donald Trump's infamous remarks confusing Andrew Jackson and the Civil War. Robinson pauses, then points out how a few things there are a little problematic. The audience laughs. He then goes on to explain the reasons why this is problematic—how Jackson had died long before the war had started, how Jackson had enslaved people—but it doesn't matter. The choir likely already was aware of the weird and ignorant way Trump would praise Jackson; those who (literally) still adore Jackson and think he was a populist "man of the people" probably will think that they, too, are being laughed at, and will likely turn it off by that point.

Who We Are is a good documentary. It's an important documentary. It's a documentary many (especially younger people) really ought to see. But the target audience should actually be people who would be more vulnerable to falling for these notions that racism "isn't really who we are," that it's not a part of this country's DNA. They are the ones who need to hear these arguments and understand the reality of the situation. The film will, however, likely fall flat for them.