“We are not trying to create a safe space; what we need is a brave space,” said André Lee ’93 in his opening statement. Lee, a Connecticut College alum, returned to campus to facilitate a screening of his newest film project, I’m Not Racist, Am I? on Feb. 11 in Palmer Auditorium to a packed audience of students, faculty, administrators and staff.
I’m Not Racist, Am I? is Lee’s fourth film, and grew from his penultimate project, “The Prep School Negro.” Both films explore the latent world of race relations in education as well as the challenges associated with beginning important conversations about racial privilege and structural inequity.
“The Prep School Negro” was a project that was deeply personal to Lee as he was one of the very few students of color that attended a preparatory school in Philadelphia. The process of making this first film served to illicit more questions than answers and inspired Lee to continue with his project of helping younger students begin mapping out their own social locations in the context of greater structural inequalities.
I’m Not Racist, Am I? followed the journey of twelve selected students from across schools and neighborhoods in New York City. The students’ experiences with race varied from a young white woman that grew up in a neighborhood of mostly African-American families, to a student that self-identified as mixed race living on the Upper West Side. The cohort committed themselves to a year long series of facilitated conversations and retreats that would serve to dissect racism. They also learned how racism related to their own lives and the lives of the people around them.
“Finding these students was a process in itself,” commented Lee in an interview. “It wasn’t as though we immediately had a cohesive group. Interest came and went and the group had several evolutions before we found this final mix.”
Before the screening, Lee posed three essential questions to the audience to consider as they watched the film: “What is your definition of racism? Do you think racism exists in America? What is your own personal relation with race?” These are the same questions that were asked time and time again to the students in the film, and the audience’s consideration of the same topics fully immersed viewers into the experiences and conversations being held on screen.
Though this film is considered a documentary, the manner in which events and discoveries unfolded had the same narrative arc one might see in a feature film. As the viewer is introduced to the different students and given insight into their private lives and individual connections (or lack thereof) with race, we see the complex landscape and range of experience that defines students of the same age.
The film defines racism as “Race Relations + Power = Racism.” This equation is deceptively simple and serves as the most boiled-down iteration of the students’ discussions of the architecture of urban inequality and balances of power between different races and ethnicities. It was almost funny to watch as the facilitator turned the page between a detailed map of how resources are spread through communities, riddled with arrows and footnotes, to this simple, bold statement. The first turning point came when a student asked the implicit question: “Wait, so does this mean all white people are racist?”
“Yes,” responded one of the facilitators on screen. A laugh rippled through the audience as the camera panned to the faces of the two white women in the group as their jaws slackened with disbelief. However, it was a poignant moment that showed the effect that these conversations were eventually going to have on these students in terms of how they saw themselves, and how they talked about others.
As the film progressed, stakes rose higher and higher as students came to various realizations about the world they lived in and began to bring these conversations back home to their families. Various alliances were formed between different students, and it was interesting to see that those relationships were drawn along race lines, which seemed to both conflict and inform the challenges the students and facilitators faced as they moved through the course of the film.
“One of the biggest challenges I faced in making this film was not jumping in to direct the conversation or
to “make it better” when the students were struggling,” said Lee. Though Lee was directly involved in developing the course of the students’ study, he did not attend the conversations in order to allow them to evolve organically.
In order to help along the progress of these discussions, André Lee enlisted the help of Liza Talusan, a fellow Conn alumna from the class of 1997. Talusan now works as the Director of Intercultural Affairs at Stonehill College, as well as a facilitator, trainer and consultant for diversity and inclusion related activities, initiatives and development.
After participating in a panel of speakers during Fall Weekend concerning the impacts of race in higher education, Lee approached Talusan with the promising line, “So, what are you doing Saturday?” After some initial confusion and determining that Lee was not asking Talusan on a date, he invited her to participate as a facilitator for the film. Six days later, Talusan was in New York City with the students as she guided them through what came to be the most emotionally fraught conversation of the film. It was the moment in which, as the students put it, “things got real.”
“You have to go through different doors in different conversations,” said Talusan during the Question and Answer session that followed the events. “Each student is coming from a different place, and that changes how you engage.”
As powerful as the film was, it spurred heated conversation after the screening. When the audience was asked to describe the film in one word, one said “incomplete”; another viewer also asked “When is the college edition coming out?”
Another concern that was expressed was the lack of intersectionality in the diversity training portrayed onscreen. Of course, it is important to remember that what was over 80 hours of footage was boiled down to a mere hour and thirty minutes. What the audience sees is only the most pivotal moments, and not all the difficult hours of consideration and self-reflection that filled the rest of the year. It is also important to note, added Lee, that intersectionality is very much a concept that is not encountered until the first or second year of college at most institutions and is difficult to teach high school students.
That being said, it is clear that the conversations, both in the film and in discussions that follow it as it is screened around the country, do not stop when the credits roll. We are only given snippets of the experience, a sample size, but it is not meant to be all inclusive, and indeed, cannot be expected to incorporate every aspect of diversity education.
“[One of the students] Sacha now runs a radical race blog…it changed their lives,” said Lee on the progress of the students as he follows up after the experience of making the documentary. The film itself was meant to start a conversation, and now it is up to everyone that comes in contact with the film and those who participated to keep it going. •
