If you’ve ever had a slave, please raise your hand, Jeffrey Robinson asked a live audience at the start of Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America, a documentary based on a lecture he took a decade to complete. Spent.
Obviously no one raises a hand in the auditorium. It’s 2018 New York City! But the few seconds that follow the question are probably the only chance these audience members have to put some distance between themselves and the country’s regrettable record of racial oppression. No, Robinson points out, slavery may not have been our fault. But this is our shared history.
And then Robinson, a longtime criminal defense attorney and former deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, begins his harrowing journey through centuries of institutional racism. Along the way he points to both the well-known (the plantings, the lynchings, the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre) and the less widely known (the disturbing third verse of the Star-Spangled Banner, or the proposal advertised by future President Andrew Jackson). For any 100 whips, an additional $10 was given to his escaped slave). No matter how much you think you already know, you’re bound to learn new things from Who We Are, directed by Emily and Sarah Kunsler. And be stunned, at some point.
How did this lecture come about? Robinson explains that he became a father in 2011, when his sister died and his 13-year-old son moved in. Suddenly, Robinson needed to teach a black teen about racism. In educating himself, he was stunned that he was fortunate enough to have had a stellar education, including a Harvard law degree that he himself did not know.
They started sharing their findings in community centers, churches, conference rooms. The directors suggested a film after listening to him. His resulting film is anchored by a 2018 lecture at New York’s historic town hall and filled with archival footage, photographs, and current interviews with the likes of 107-year-old Lacey Benningfield Randall, one of the last survivors of the Tulsa massacre . , and Eric Garner’s mother Gwen Carr, whose death from a police chokehold became a rallying cry for Black Lives Matter. Robinson also briefly argues with a man holding a Confederate flag, who insists that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery.
At a slavery museum in Charleston, South Carolina, Robinson examines two pair bonds; One is adult sized, the other child sized. We also see an oak tree hanging and, later, photographs of white Americans standing next to the bodies of black people, called Robinsons, a scene once common and accepted in America.
But despite the many references to traumatic periods in American history, it is also Robinson’s deftly sprinkling of his own life experience that helps personalize the proceedings and gives the film an emotional wallop.
Many of these moments take place in Memphis, not where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, but also where Robinson grew up. He travels back to his hometown, where, he tells us, his parents tried to buy a house in a white neighborhood, but they weren’t there until white friends went and bought it for him. was refused. Then, when the family moved in, a neighbor showed up with freshly baked chocolate chip cookies for the lady of the house, but when Robinson’s Black Mother came to the door, the cookies in hand were folded and gone.
In another scene, a white high school friend admitted that he never told Robinson that he was once denied entry to a basketball game because of Robinson’s race; A pastor intervened, without Robinson ever knowing. The story brings tears to both men’s eyes.
Robinson closes on a note of tentative hope. Black Lives Matter protests uniting people of all races on American streets, he saw: the potential for radical change is in the air. Martin Luther King in the 60s.
If the format of the lectures is inherently limited, the directors do a great job of weaving together a compelling visual and emotional experience. One can only hope that he, and Robinson, achieve the wide audience the film deserves (the documentary is part of a broader educational initiative, the Who We Are Project).
Robinson’s final point is that we are at a more pivotal point than we were in the late 60s. Will we fall again, he asks?
Or, will this generation decide to do something different?
Sony Pictures Classics release Who We Are, has been rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for thematic content, disturbing images, violence, and strong language involving racism. Running time: 117 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
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MPAA definition of PG-13: Strong warning to parents. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.
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