The documentary Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America may be the most personal work Jeff Robinson has ever been a part of.
Originally premiering at SXSW, it is a film that draws on Robinson’s long history of studying law and racial justice in America. Until April of 2021, Robinson served as the director of the ACLU Trone Center for Justice and Equality and as the ACLU deputy legal director. After graduating from Harvard in 1981, he worked as a public defender in Seattle for several years. He then started a private practice in the city. He also was a part of the ACLU-established John Adams Project that defended those held at Guantanamo Bay following the 9/11 attacks.
Even as he uses that experience to inform the documentary’s journey, it’s interwoven with the texture of Robinson’s own life. We see how he remembers when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Robinson’s hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. He remembers his parents faced racist discrimination when trying to buy a house yet still had to find a place to raise him and his siblings.
In 2011, Robinson began raising his then 13-year-old nephew as a child of his own. As a Black man now raising a Black son, Robinson started to think about what he would tell him about racism in America. It motivated Robinson to begin reading more, traveling to various parts of the country and speaking about his perspective on the future and how it connects to our past. This documentary is the product of that work, with a talk Robinson gave in 2018 in New York City at the Town Hall Theater intercut with his travels and various interviews he conducted along the way as part of the Who We Are Project.
Robinson sat down virtually with us for an interview to discuss the film and the country’s direction.