For more than ten years, Jeffery Robinson has told an unvarnished history of the United States in an ever-changing lecture presentation. His lectures, now presented as part of his organization, the Who We Are Project, examine how racism against black people has been linked to the country’s heritage since its inception. The new documentary, “Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America,” captures Robinson’s dazzling account (filmed at Town Hall in New York City) and intersperses interviews with civil rights figures and others from his travels across the country.
Directed by Emily and Sarah Kunstler, the film joins a series of documentaries unearthing races and the histories of marginalized people in America, such as Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro” and Ava DuVernay’s “13th.”
“This is not ‘Eyes on the Prize,'” Robinson said of the new film, which is available on major digital platforms. “But I think it’s a call for us to be something radically different in the future.”
When reviewing “Who We Are” for The Times, Ben Kenigsberg made it a Critic’s Pick, writing: “It’s a confrontational film, but never an alienating one.”
Robinson, a criminal defense attorney, was director of the ACLU’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality in New York, and he remembers walking past the former Cotton Exchange on his way to work. I spoke to him and the Kunstlers (whose last feature, “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe,” was about their father, the civil rights lawyer). These are excerpts from our interview.
“Who We Are” is in part intended to chart the role of white supremacy in American history. How did you handle that?
JEFFERY ROBINSON I say it as a rhetorical question in the film: “What if I said America is founded on white supremacy? Someone might say, “Jeff, that’s really extreme.” But when you read the words of the people who founded our country and see what they’ve done, I think it’s an inescapable conclusion. Some people have said that the Constitution was a compromise between those who wanted slavery and those who did not want slavery. This “compromise” protected the institution of slavery, gave the South additional congressional representatives and electoral colleges to protect the institution of slavery, and made black attempts to be free unconstitutional. It was unconstitutional for me to try and get away from my owner!
SARAH ARTIST And they all accomplished that without using the word slavery. We have a history of hiding what we mean as a country. When we pass laws that preserve and uphold white supremacy, we don’t actually say what we’re doing.
ROBINSON There is no way you can associate white supremacy with a law that says you can’t change the name of iconic landmarks in the state of Alabama – until you understand that essentially these are all monuments to slavery, and to people who enslaved people. .
The film also reveals the details of the lived Black experience: for example, the fingerprints that enslaved builders left on walls they built.
EMILY ARTIST The facts in the abstract are meaningless if you cannot connect them to the actual human experience. Those fingerprints are an example of a monument to a history of lived experiences of enslaved black people in Charleston, SC, and in fact all of this country, which persists despite the best efforts to erase them. Similarly, the foundations for the houses in Tulsa, Oklahoma, are [site of the 1921 massacre]still exist where the houses were never rebuilt.
ROBINSON There was a time when we were talking to Mother Randle [a survivor of the Tulsa massacre] and she said, “There was a pile of bodies.” It just sent a shiver down my spine – this woman over 100 years old went back to that memory in her life.
Jeffery, how did it feel to share you and your family experiences of racism, like the school basketball game where the hosts didn’t want you to play?
ROBINSON We went to Dr. Tiffany Crutcher and asked her to talk about her feelings about her brother being murdered on live television practically by the Tulsa Police Department [in 2016]† And it felt like, Okay, I have something to share. Dick [a basketball coach who stuck up for Robinson] was 21 years old when this incident occurred in Walls, Miss. This is just a few years after civil rights activists disappeared and were murdered in Mississippi. Where he got the courage to go about it the way he did, I don’t know. But it was clear that if I didn’t play, we would all leave. And he wouldn’t do that to me when I was 12 years old. I think he basically saw me as his younger brother.
Can you talk about recording the conversation about slavery with a man you encountered at a Confederate statue representing Flags Across the South, the pro-Confederate flag group?
EMILY ARTIST I felt it encompassed the movie’s premise. I asked Jeff, “Do you think that gentleman can be reached?” And Jeff said, “I don’t know if he can be reached, but I know if nobody tries, he certainly won’t be.” It’s worth making the effort, it’s worth getting the facts straight and moving on. We cannot be startled into silence by people who think differently, speak very loudly, and come out with force and wave Confederate flags.
ROBINSON The conversation didn’t go the way he might have thought it would in terms of me getting mad at him or something. There was a little pull on his face as we left, and I think we at least got a few wheels spinning in his head.
How does the film relate to the controversy surrounding laws prohibiting the teaching of certain American history?
ROBINSON The first time we met in person to talk about this [movie] was June 20, 2017. No one even mentioned CRT [Critical Race Theory] back in the days. It would have been like, “What’s that, a cereal or something?” So this was not done in response to those laws. But the laws that are coming could tell you how scared people are of the information in this film.
This is about the concept of ‘the mind of the emerging generation’. All the way back in 1837, John C. Calhoun, one of the most virulent racists in American history, said that we can’t teach kids about the abolition of slavery in school because if we learn that, slavery will be over. The day before the [Trump] government, they released something called “The 1776 Report” that talked about a return to patriotic education, and they use the exact same quote that John C. Calhoun did: “the spirit of the rising generation.”
SARAH ARTIST Before there were anti-CRT laws, there were textbook wars. So there is an endless battle going on over what and how much our children are taught in school about the history of our country. One of the most compelling things about Jeff’s speech is that he harks back to primary sources. You don’t just have to learn it in school. You can look it up yourself.