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Back in April, Joe wrote about the major new book, Inheriting the Trade by Thomas Norman DeWolf, about a slave-trading family of “The Deep North.” Tonight, the related documentary, “Traces of the Trade,” by Katrina Browne airs on PBS (check your local listings). And, while I’m not great at predicting future trends, I think we will increasingly see non-fiction books combined with documentary films geared for (near) simultaneous release. Mark my words, this is a trend in search of a name, and it has implications for those of us in the classroom as well.


And, I stumbled upon another documentary called “Resolved,” (currently available on HBO in demand). It’s a documentary about high school debaters, predominantly white, and one debate team from a predominantly black school. It’s deeply engrossing - and not just because I did speech and debate in high school. I was unexpectedly blown away by this film, especially the Freire-ian-turn it takes. I highly recommend this film.


Finally, a brief thanks to Melissa F. Weiner, Assistant Professor at Quinnipiac University, for her suggestions for additional video titles. I’ve updated the video page with her suggestions.


Addendum from Joe: I just finished reading the very personal book by Tom DeWolf, Inheriting the Trade, and it is indeed dynamite. You learn not only about the central role of New Englanders in the slave trade, but also about the way in which some members of a large and extended white family learned about their heavy slavery history and tried to come to grips with it, including travels to slave regions of the US and to Africa. I highly recommend the book to you and for class use from high school to graduate school. It will likely change, a little or a lot, all who read it seriously.

We could improve overall health if we would address economic and racial inequality. That is the message of new documentary, “Unnatural Causes,” directed by Larry Adelman, and airing beginning tonight on PBS stations throughout the U.S. This short post is just a programming alert for those interested in viewing, recording or teaching about the series. I’ll be back after it airs with a post or two about individual episodes. You can check your local listings here.

Elliott Jaspin’s reporting on the “leave or die” imperatives issued by whites to blacks throughout the U.S. and continuing for 60 years is part of the systemic racism we talk about so often here. Sherilyn Ifill of Blackprof.com has a good post on Marcos Williams’ new documentary about this, “Banished: American Ethnic Cleansings.” Ifill is one of the featured experts in the film and her post is no case of shameless self-promotion on her part. This is an important documentary that addresses the some of the most reprehensible acts of white racism and the way these acts continue to reverberate in very material ways in people’s everyday lives. Here’s the trailer via YouTube:





Williams’ film charts the history, and contemporary descendants of, whites who violently expelled blacks from dozens of towns and counties throughout the U.S. For the classroom, the film would make an excellent companion to Loewen’s Sundown Towns. “Banished” is currently airing on PBS, you can check local listings here.

So, it’s like this.  I often work at home and while I blog, or grade online student papers, or answer email, I also watch a documentary.   Love me some multi-media-multi-tasking.  This morning while I graded student assignments, I also watched “Malcolm X: Make It Plain” (2005) which just aired on PBS’ American Experience.   It’s excellent and I highly recommend it.


What Malcolm had to say then resonates today, and it is both powerful and poignant to see the footage of him. Perhaps most moving are the scenes that capture his sense of humor, and the filmmakers, Orlando Bagwell and Steve Fayer, deftly use this to frame the piece. They use a clip at both the beginning and the end of a white reporter aggressively asking, “Do you consider yourself ‘militant’?” To which Malcolm replies, with sly grin, “No, I consider myself Malcolm.”


Lots of resources at the PBS site, and as they say, check your local listings.

Bob Herbert has an excellent Op-Ed in today’s New York Times. His focus is on South Carolina.  And given that I’m teaching a visual media course in which we’re discussing the use of non-fiction films to address issues of racial injustice, I was particularly struck by Herbert’s mention of the documentary, “Corridor of Shame,” about racial disparities in the South Carolina educational system.   I’ll have to add that one to my list of films to see.


In reviewing the historical context of racism in South Carolina, Herbert makes reference to Benjamin Tillman, aka “Pitchfork Ben,” who served as both a governor and senator there. Herbert writes:

“A statue of Tillman …. is on prominent display outside the statehouse. … A mortal enemy of black people, he bragged that he and his followers had disenfranchised “as many as we could,” and he publicly defended the murder of blacks.


In a speech on the Senate floor, he declared:


‘We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.’


Real change is more than problematic in a state so warped by its past that it can continue to officially admire a figure like Tillman.”

Much of the MLK-holiday-themed rhetoric would have us believe that we’re past “that kind” of racism, but when monuments to Tillman still stand and when white supremacists still march (even when outnumbered), it seems to me that this type of racism is part of the fabric of this society, rather than a regional or historical aberration.

This is a short video (10:23) about the “History of Racism” from the BBC, via YouTube, it’s the first of six parts:

I’ve been writing and thinking about the potential of digital video at places like YouTube for subverting dominant, controlling images over at my personal blog, Thinking at the Interface. I also use a lot of documentary films and videos in my teaching. I’ve been experimenting with how to include digital video here at Racism Review. Originally, I’d wanted to include a separate video blog here, but the blogging software won’t allow me to do that (and I don’t have the coding chops to hack the software and bend it to my will). So, I’m just going to do what everyone else does, and periodically include a digital video here (via YouTube) as I run across them. And, on the additional page called “Videos” linked above, I’ll keep a list of documentary films and videos that are useful for teaching and learning about racism. I’ve got a few up there now as a preliminary list. If you’ve got a title, please drop a comment here and I’ll add it to the list.