Travis Wilk­er­son: ​‘There’s a tremen­dous oppor­tu­ni­ty for social change right now’

On 20 Jan­u­ary, 2017 Don­ald Trump was sworn in as the 45^th Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States. Before a crowd of dis­put­ed size, Trump spoke of inner-cities and ​“Amer­i­can car­nage” – a dog whis­tle to his vot­ers who upheld him as a white cor­rec­tion to the pre­vi­ous eight years. In a piece for The Atlantic enti­tled The First White Pres­i­dent, Ta-Nehsi Coates wrote, ​“It is insuf­fi­cient to state the obvi­ous of Don­ald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be pres­i­dent were it not for this fact.” That same night in Sun­dance, CO, film­mak­er Travis Wilk­er­son, equipped with a micro­phone, script and a lap­top, gave a live mul­ti­me­dia per­for­mance of his own white nightmare.

Did You Won­der Who Fired the Gun? is a per­son­al inves­ti­ga­tion into Wilkerson’s fam­i­ly as he reck­ons with the effects of a 1940s shoot­ing in rur­al Alaba­ma when his great-grand­fa­ther, SE Branch, shot to death a black man, Bill Spann, and nev­er saw any legal con­se­quences. Using home-video footage, musi­cal inter­rup­tions and talk­ing heads inter­views Wilkerson’s film is an explo­ration of whiteness.

Wilkerson’s nar­ra­tion dom­i­nates the film, a relaxed dron­ing that projects false author­i­ty and is con­tin­u­al­ly dis­rupt­ed. It exam­ines how the death of a black patri­arch was an era­sure and his great-grandfather’s crime ben­e­fit­ted his fam­i­ly. A treat­ment of the pri­vate face of racism, Wilk­er­son con­nects his own fam­i­ly expe­ri­ence to threads of struc­tur­al vio­lence that per­sist today. It is a film that search­es for the pri­vate face of Amer­i­can racism and it’s ugly con­ti­nu­ity with­in the Amer­i­can iden­ti­ty. Wilk­er­son pre­sent­ed his film at this year’s Mon­tréal Inter­na­tion­al Doc­u­men­tary Film Fes­ti­val, where he sat down with LWLies to dis­cuss his work, Ken Burns’ The Viet­nam War, Char­lottesville and more.

LWLies: What moti­vat­ed you to make this film?

Wilk­er­son: When I very first start­ed it, I didn’t have a wider agen­da. I strange because although this sto­ry is was very con­nect­ed to my fam­i­ly, it remind­ed me of the Trayvon Mar­tin and George Zim­mer­man cas­es. There were so many lit­tle details, because of course my great-grand­fa­ther was not law enforce­ment but he had the pro­tec­tion of law enforce­ment. This was not a police killing but the set of cir­cum­stances are very sim­i­lar. I was real­ly intrigued by that dimen­sion of it. I cer­tain­ly had no notion of mak­ing some­thing that would end up func­tion­ing like this.

With­in the US, we have this strange inabil­i­ty to be hon­est and sober and real about his­to­ry. Even some­one like Oba­ma, who in many ways is much more pro­gres­sive than what we are fac­ing right now, he still went to Hiroshi­ma and couldn’t say, ​‘I’m sor­ry that we dropped a nuclear bomb on your city.’ We can’t do that, even now. Amer­i­ca is such a pow­er­ful coun­try, but our inabil­i­ty to acknowl­edge our errors is a tremen­dous sign of weak­ness to me. It’s a sign of dis­hon­esty and cowardice.

In what ways do you think Amer­i­ca fails to deal with its past?

One of the things I’ve wres­tled with a great deal with this year is my father’s death in April from a can­cer relat­ed to Agent Orange. He was a heli­copter pilot dur­ing the Viet­nam War. In a weird way, Viet­nam has always hov­ered over my fam­i­ly. My mom was from Alaba­ma, my dad was a Viet­nam vet, and those two things –racism and war – were dis­cussed every­day in our house. We engaged with it all the time. It’s been a strange expe­ri­ence to have this con­fronta­tion where I’m look­ing at what my father went through and imag­in­ing how it extends to mil­lions of Viet­namese people.

The Ken Burns’ film is a kind of dis­as­ter to me, the notion that you would want to cre­ate this incred­i­bly long and elab­o­rate doc­u­ment full of facts. It’s the same way he approach­es the Civ­il War: fun­da­men­tal­ly its entire analy­sis is, ​‘What a trag­ic shame, it’s just trag­ic.’ No! It was a crim­i­nal war from the begin­ning. French colo­nial­ism col­laps­es, the US jumps in and tries to play this role. It’s actu­al­ly very sim­ple, the US involve­ment begins at [the Bat­tle of] Dien Bien Phu. The main thing about that film to me, is that its focus is equal­ly split between the trau­ma of Amer­i­cans and the trau­ma of the Viet­namese. He want­ed to show the wounds of the war among Amer­i­cans being healed final­ly, but part of the prob­lem is that there still isn’t any real engage­ment with how cat­a­stroph­ic our involve­ment was.

Do you see a con­nec­tion with your film and the audio­vi­su­al envi­ron­ment of 2017, where we share images of black death and suf­fer­ing on social media?

Show­ing those images is actu­al­ly coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. What it does is it gives the view­er – who should be feel­ing empa­thy – an under­stand­ing of their rela­tion­ship to the vio­lence. Once they see those images, which are so hor­ri­fy­ing, their feel­ings are affect­ed neg­a­tive­ly – in a sense their feel­ings are hurt by what they see. When they see them, they shut down and instead of recog­nis­ing their rela­tion­ship to the vio­lence, they feel that they them­selves are a vic­tim of the violence.

I always go back to the Rod­ney King tape, which is real­ly the first famous video footage of an act of vio­lence. The cops actu­al­ly used the video in their defence because they showed it over and over and over again to the jury, until they were no longer hor­ri­fied by it – they became numb to it. And they would say, ​‘Oh look, he’s lift­ing his arm and he is try­ing to go at them’. So the objec­tive evi­dence became very sub­jec­tive and became deeply inter­con­nect­ed to racism and how we receive a black per­son who is resist­ing vio­lence and that is how they are exon­er­at­ed. I feel like we are doing all these things with all these instances of vio­lence, we con­sume and dis­sem­i­nate it in a way that makes us numb to it.

How do you feel about the events of Char­lottesville and the cur­rent polit­i­cal cli­mate, has it changed your rela­tion­ship to the film?

It hasn’t exact­ly changed my rela­tion­ship to the film for the sim­ple rea­son that what hap­pened in Char­lottesville – hor­rif­ic though it was – was not much of a rup­ture to me because of my exist­ing inter­est in activism and pol­i­tics. I have been think­ing about these things for a long time. For exam­ple, the infa­mous Greens­boro Mas­sacre, in which five peo­ple were killed in a ral­ly against the Klan, I was 11 or 12 when that hap­pened, I was already in a fam­i­ly where there was a lot of polit­i­cal engage­ment so we talked about it. So [Char­lottesville] just felt like a re-emer­gence as opposed to a fun­da­men­tal shift.

I think right now there is a tremen­dous oppor­tu­ni­ty for social change, but I am also real­ly wor­ried about. I feel like we’re at this tip­ping point where things could dra­mat­i­cal­ly go in an even worse direc­tion, or they could go in bet­ter direc­tion. Going through the process of this film and see­ing its recep­tion – where on one hand a lot of peo­ple have engaged with it pos­i­tive­ly and see it as a pro­gres­sive act, and oth­ers less so – seems to be shut­ting down discourse.

In the time that I’ve been show­ing the film there have been a num­ber of instances of art engag­ing with his­to­ry in a cer­tain way – I’m think­ing of the Whit­ney Bien­nale con­tro­ver­sy and also what hap­pened with Sam Durand up at the Walk­er Art Cen­tre in Min­neso­ta, where he built a sculp­ture per­tain­ing to the his­to­ry of lynch­ings with­in Min­neso­ta. And then there’s the recent con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing the Uni­ver­si­ty of Indi­ana and the Thomas Hart Ben­ton mur­al, which deals with the his­to­ry of Indi­ana. It is an extra­or­di­nary mur­al and there is a sec­tion an unequiv­o­cal crit­i­cism of the Klan, yet some stu­dents are say­ing that it should be tak­en down because it hurts the feel­ings of those affect­ed by that violence.

How will the most racist com­mu­ni­ties ben­e­fit if we sim­ply stop engag­ing with the his­to­ry of their oppres­sion? I’m not say­ing that we shouldn’t be high­ly con­scious of the way we do it – we can’t just mind­less­ly and go about depict­ing black suf­fer­ing – but we need to depict our role in that ter­ri­ble his­to­ry so that we can address it in a mean­ing­ful way.

Why do you think some peo­ple are unwill­ing to talk about the film when the events took place so long ago and near­ly every­one involved is dead?

It’s some­thing I can­not ful­ly answer. Hon­est­ly, when I began to work on this… I don’t want to say that I thought that peo­ple would be more forth­com­ing but I guess in some sense I did. What you said is so valid – every­one is dead, it’s not as if SE Branch is going to be tried, he was gone when I was a lit­tle baby. What is the fear? What is the fear in being hon­est now and being sober now when some­thing is so many decades over? That’s where this con­ti­nu­ity of his­to­ry becomes a pow­er­ful force, because you are say­ing that it’s not real­ly not about back then, it’s about right now. That’s why it’s so uncom­fort­able for peo­ple, because things haven’t changed.

I don’t know Alaba­ma that well. I went there often as a child but when I returned 20 years lat­er as an adult I was stunned at how in small-town Alaba­ma it might as well be 1955: the social rela­tions seemed utter­ly unchanged. Are we sup­posed to dis­lo­cate it and say, ​‘That’s Alaba­ma!’ This is where I get into chal­lenges with my own film, because part of the prob­lem for me is that north­ern­ers look at it and say, ​‘Oh my god, those south­ern­ers are so awful!’ That is how Amer­i­cans read it.

Do you think there will ever be a major social shift, where peo­ple will be able to face the real­i­ty of their country’s statehood?

It’s obvi­ous­ly a very dif­fi­cult ques­tion and it’s hard for me to answer. When we think about what’s hap­pen­ing with regards to gen­der rela­tions in the enter­tain­ment indus­try, we seem to be in a state of flux around the dis­cus­sion of cul­pa­bil­i­ty and respon­si­bil­i­ty. The cas­cad­ing of these rev­e­la­tions reveals some­thing else to me, which is that when every sig­nif­i­cant fig­ure is in some way inter­con­nect­ed it becomes a sys­tem­at­ic prob­lem. It is not a few bad apples, as many peo­ple have said of the police vio­lence issue.

Per­haps we’re now enter­ing a peri­od in which that shift could take place. Where peo­ple who are con­nect­ed to oppres­sion in the sense that they ben­e­fit from it – even if they aren’t active­ly par­tic­i­pat­ing in it – will take an active role in denounc­ing it, in address­ing it, in con­fronting it and in chang­ing it. The notion that the oppressed have all the respon­si­bil­i­ty to decry and to respond to this issue is just insane to me. Of course, the voic­es of the oppressed are the most impor­tant, but the only way we can move for­ward is to lis­ten to the voic­es of the oppres­sors who then take a stand against that same oppression.

Are you work­ing on any new projects?

It’s fun­ny, I always am, except right now. This project real­ly drained the tank for me. I think because it was so inter­nal, so fam­i­ly ori­ent­ed and hon­est­ly just uncom­fort­able. I’m not sug­gest­ing in any way I was a vic­tim of it, but it hasn’t been a pleas­ant expe­ri­ence for me. I’ve start­ed work­ing on a treat­ment for a nar­ra­tive film about a Nepalese immi­grant who runs a store in a town that I lived in. It’s a per­son­al film about lone­li­ness. I’m not sure when I’ll shoot that yet, and there are a few oth­er things I’m inter­est­ed in.

I recent­ly dis­cov­ered that the word ​‘preda­tor’ actu­al­ly has the same latin ori­gin as ​‘plun­der’. That unset­tles me, because when I think of preda­tor I think of a shark or a wolf, and plun­der is theft, so it can only refer to a species that has the con­cept of prop­er­ty. But a wolf is not steal­ing any­thing, a wolf is hunt­ing. It’s inter­est­ing that we’ve man­aged to dis­lo­cate a word that specif­i­cal­ly refers to human beings and use it to sug­gest some­thing ani­mal­is­tic. I’m inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry of plun­der­ing because it is the foun­da­tion of the Unit­ed States.