SB 30 Episode 69: Jeffrey Robinson and the filmmakers behind Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America

StoryBoard 30

“We’re fifty years later now (since the tipping point of the Civil Rights era and the King assassination), and once again, young activists in America are making Americans take a look in the mirror in terms of our true history of race and racial prejudice. Once again the young activists are calling us to account. Once again America is having to look at issues of race dead in the eye. And once again, we are at a tipping point. And the question for all of us is, What are we going to do about it?”

That’s civil rights lawyer Jeffrey Robinson, speaking to a packed audience in 2018 in New York City’s Town Hall Theatre and for the cameras in the award-winning documentary Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America. The film interweaves moments from Mr. Robinson’s lecture series with personal anecdotes, location interviews, and shocking revelations. Here criminal defense and civil rights lawyer Jeffery Robinson draws a stark timeline of anti-Black racism in the United States, from slavery to the modern myth of a post-racial America.

Benefitting The Who We Are Project, the film was completed in 2021, is being distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, and arrives here in Memphis for a special screening and Q&A on Thursday February 24, 2022, at the Crosstown Theatre. It began a local run February 25, 2022, at Malco’s Studio on the Square.

Listen as Jeffrey Robinson and the film’s co-director Emily Kunstler sit down in conversation with StoryBoard 30 host Mark Fleischer to discuss the film and the issues of racism in America.