CIVIL WAR (OR, WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE?) Film Review — Who Is the Narrator?

The bell rings, signaling the class in this oldest public school in the USA to move on, even though  disquieting conversations linger in the air.    The students leave behind their seemingly indefatigable teacher, a White woman, whom we can imagine is already planning her next attack on the systemic racism that has a hold on her charges’ minds.  She wields primary sources, Socratic methods, and sometimes just flattery.  She wants to lay bare the BIGGER lie that gave birth to the big lie of today’s headlines —viz. that slavery was then, and this is now.

Some images spicing the film are familiar – like Silent Sam being knocked down by UNC students and similar high-profile retirements of Confederacy monuments, as well as a cringeworthy minstrel show exploitation in a Shirley Temple movie. Others are less everyday, and – at least for this writer – especially shocking.  A middle-aged White woman wears a T-shirt with the slogan I Have a Dream – and models the Confederate flag decoration co-mingling with the MLK quote.  A father asserts that if there are going to be reparations, it should include payments to his family for all their lost property—meaning slaves.  Meanwhile, his grown son sits there squirming;  then he asserts that slavery was wrong, but adds the disclaimer that he is still processing. A White teacher in Chattanooga, seemingly well-intentioned with aims to teach empathy, may not notice how the African-American students in his class sit  silently as the Black experience remains omitted from his instruction, or at least the parts that we see.

This documentary is star-studded—not in the Hollywood sense but in terms of luminaries who can cut to the chase of the tortured history of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction and how it haunts us today.  We learn from Dr. David Blight how the re-unification of the vanquished South with the North after the Civil War was largely made possible by their shared racist ideology.  We are reminded by Kellie Carter Jackson, a scholar of Black abolitionists and author of Force and Freedom,  how differently violence is perceived when the fighter is Black or White.  From Howard University to a curator of the African-American Civil War Museum we learn the history of Black resistance to slavery since Day 1.  More, we see what they see—how critical it is to teach this history and especially to African-American students finding their way in a White dominated society. Young students —in intimate one-on-one interviews, or as asides in classroom discussions— give searing snapshots of just where our country is at vis-à-vis race.