Before the latest in the nation’s bedeviling race saga leapt from over-blown farce to rending tragedy, from the vaguely instructive kerfuffle of Rachel Dolezal to the malignant murders in South Carolina’s Mother Emanuel AME Church, “The ” nailed a relationship essential to lasting change: the ally.
In faux defense of Spokane’s former NAACP prez, host Jon Stewart told cast member Jessica Williams that Dolezal might be forgiven for claiming to be African-American because “She’s working and advocating for black causes.”
The ultra-quick Williams replied, “(S)he still could have done that as a white person — maybe even more effectively. … She just single-white-femaled all black women. We don’t need oppression cosplay. We need allies, not replacements.”
There are two works currently playing for viewers locally (one on stage, the other on screen) wanting to engage the importance of the ally in these fraught times.
On Friday, “3 ½ Minutes, 10 Bullets” opened at the Chez Artiste movie theater. Marc Silver’s moving and nuanced documentary recounts the shooting death of 17-year-old Jordan Davis outside a Jacksonville, Fla., gas station in 2012 and the subsequent trial of Michael Dunn. Dunn used Florida’s “stand your ground” laws as his defense for firing into a SUV with four teenagers after an argument about their loud “rap crap” music. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
In Boulder, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s production of the Bard’s tale of race, resentment and a riven alliance, “Othello,” sallies forth in all its ugliness and genius.
The general still murders wife Desdemona in a foul act that seems to confirm the Venetian racism coursing through the play. But behind the scenes, director Lisa Wolpe and actor Peter Macon have plied a long-standing creative friendship that — while not letting the Moor off the hook — restores his humanity in a play in which his simmering ensign, Iago, works diabolically to undo.
“Allies.” The word has the ring of a battle cry, the sound of strategic alliances forged during war time. And the killings of black folks, the death of unarmed black men at the hands of police officers, carries the acrid tang of an undeclared war.
So the question of allies has a fresh urgency. Who will stand with us against the racism that shapes the bigot’s perception of us, implicitly and explicitly?
It was in this context that Colorado state senator of Denver’s Shorter Community AME Church. But it was his follow-up Facebook post that suggested the thoughtful grappling of a potential ally.
“As a white man I have never been called on to be an ambassador for my race. I was never the only person who looked like me in a college seminar when the room uncomfortably waited for me to speak up on behalf of my people. … I have never been the one at the cocktail party confused for ‘the help.’ And when America met Timothy McVeigh or Ted Kaczynski or Dylan Klebold I never for a minute worried that their illness said something about me.”
This isn’t a repudiation of one’s race … la Dolezal but suggests instead a grasp of the different circumstances our bodies face in our nation’s evolving (and recalcitrant) racial history.
“When it came to the Jordan Davis story, I did ask myself from the very beginning ‘Why Me?’ ” British director Silver, who is white, said on the phone recently. “What is unique about me? There are many other people who can tell the story.”
Davis’ parents, Ron Davis and Lucia McBath, might not agree. They trusted his particular insights. “I loved his perspective. He was like an outsider looking in. That’s what I wanted, to have someone who wasn’t in the (U.S.) gun culture,” Ron Davis said, calling from Los Angeles the day the film premiered. “And he wouldn’t interfere with what we had to do, which was still mourn our son and navigate the court system, which was really hard to do.”
Now as “3 ½ Minutes, 10 Bullets” makes its way into theaters, Silver says he sees a particular value to his role and to the possibilities for the film — for white moviegoers.
“Michael Dunn works for me as a character because he himself is very blind to his own racism. He’s blind in a way that he doesn’t even realize is racist. He became a metaphor to me about a much bigger part of America that isn’t aware of its own racism,” he said.
“Black audiences know that story over and over again. Those kids in the car know exactly what Michael Dunn meant and what he implied, how he looked at them and how he read them and they know exactly why. Why a man could come to that situation with all those constructs in his head. It’s the white audiences that don’t know the nuances of that. That’s how I’ve been thinking about it.”
No one said the work of building true affinity is simple. The space between us Americans can be shot through with misgivings and misunderstandings. We black folks, too, have work to do. We should not let white racism keep us from interrogating our own biases and festering (if understandable) resentments.
Suspicion isn’t unwarranted. Trust is earned, built. Enduring change succeeds only with allies who go beyond enlightened self-interests to a deeper affinity. The word “ally” carries a less bellicose, potentially more compassionate meaning. It comes from the Latin root meaning “to bind.” The relationship Jordan Davis’ parents — the wounded, steadfast stars of “3 ½ Minutes” — and Silver forged speaks to the ties that could bind us.
The Rev. Timothy Tyler of Denver’s historic Shorter AME Church touched on it in a Colorado Public Radio interview when he mentioned the significance of “intentional” acts: like Johnston’s late-night epistle, like the white parishioners who have come to Shorter services since the murders in South Carolina.
While this has been unfolding as a black-white question, it is not. Not in this racially changing America. We need to fix the things that get in the way of understanding the project of being exquisitely human.
“We all have a shared responsibility in this country to care about one another, to care about what’s happening in the streets,” said Lucia McBath, Jordan Davis’ mother. “Without being in fear of one another, without fear of gun violence, without a fear of the unknown.”
Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567, lkennedy@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bylisakennedy
