"Those are statues that never should’ve been erected. The South lost."
Comedian and filmmaker CJ Hunt embedded himself with Neo-Confederates to understand those fighting to preserve the monuments and troubled history.
Comedian and filmmaker CJ Hunt embedded himself with Neo-Confederates to understand those fighting to preserve the monuments and troubled history.
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Short filmTranscript
00:00Folks who cling to white supremacy aren't actually interested in seeing
00:04the Black perspective on anything.
00:06The job is to show that white supremacy is absurd.
00:18Somebody is going to abuse any institution.
00:21People don't always take care of their objects well.
00:23Right.
00:24Including when that object is a person.
00:26Including when it's a person.
00:30I felt like we needed to go into that territory and show that this is widespread.
00:40This is a culture.
00:41This is a lifestyle.
00:42This is not just an issue of extremists.
01:00It is amazing in 2015 I'm fighting Robert E. Lee.
01:05This is almost hilarious.
01:08Those statues never should have been erected.
01:10The South lost.
01:12You think we're going to live in New Orleans with this.
01:14But then you see that New Orleans is really just kind of a lightning rod for everything
01:19else that started bubbling up all over the place.
01:21So you start realizing just how deeply ingrained,
01:24especially in the South, is somebody from Alabama.
01:27This overloading, remember these people, never forget these people.
01:34It's just sitting there just lingering.
01:37Every one of these arguments reveals itself ultimately to be this idea that slavery was
01:43actually pretty good.
01:44And, you know, they got to dance on Sundays.
01:48With, you know, critical race theory, there's an element of, OK, well, keep your history,
02:02keep your confederate flag, keep your mind.
02:04Let's not even talk about that anymore.
02:06Can we at least just talk about what happened?
02:07And there's still no, no, no.
02:18It's not just like, oh, well, we disagree about history.
02:22White supremacists use the lies that we tell about the past to exact violence in the present.
02:27When we are recording this, we are one day after nine lives were taken by a white supremacist
02:33in Charleston.
02:34That murderer was motivated by a lie.
02:39Those nine people lost their lives because America cannot tell the truth about its past.
02:45Can we tell the truth about what has happened to Black people and what continues to happen
02:49to Black people in America?
02:51Anytime we are arguing about monuments, that's the question.
02:54Anytime we are arguing about critical race theory, that's the question.
03:07Ten years in prison, have you knocked down a statue or monument?
03:11And you don't see it anymore.
03:13It's a lot of poor white people who bought into racial superiority as being a substitute
03:19for financial gain.
03:20This thought of racial superiority gives you some level of comfort through your pain of
03:26being white and broke.
03:28They're shutting down our freedoms, our rights, our heritage.
03:31The amount of fearmongering that white Republicans are doing around Confederate symbols and around
03:38critical race theory is in direct proportion to how little they have given their own constituents.
03:44We haven't given you your living wage, but guess what?
03:47We'll protect you from the Blacks who are coming to take your history.
03:57I do think that if this film gets in the hands of schools and teachers are able to teach
04:04this film or teach subjects related to it about what Black people were able to accomplish
04:10during Reconstruction, about the centrality of white supremacy in the Constitution, in
04:16the Confederacy, and how much the North forgave the South in order to uplift white supremacy.
04:21If those things are able to get into schools, we don't need to waste time on the other side.
04:27We cannot have reconciliation without truth.