Comedian filmmakers try to understand those fighting to keep Confederate statues

Brut America

"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.

Transcript

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.

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