Traveling While Black touches you deeply and that is exactly the intention. The 20-minute or so Virtual reality film immerses you in the history of institutional racism in the US and especially what it does to people. The location is Ben's Chili Bowl in Washington DC*. We are seated at a table in a classic dinner with people talking about what it is like to be black in America. The film, in 3D and 360 degrees, is based on a play about The Negro Motorist Green Book, a travel guide for black people published between 1936 and 1967.
It is bizarre to realise that a guide was needed to know where you could safely refuel, eat and sleep a time when the Jim Crow laws were felt down to the fibre. Literally: blacks were allowed train journeys in separate compartments, but not to go to the white toilet on the train. So passengers had to carefully plan where they could eat and how much they could drink without either peeing their trousers or relieving themselves in the open air. Where in the film The Green Book a White Savior involved, the stories of Afro-Americans take centre stage here. As it should be.
For white visitors, it is a chance to sit down with people telling their stories and feel the pain. For black visitors and visitors of colour, it is recognition, recognition and a way to discuss the trauma of racism, said Roger Ross Williams.
Too late to cry
Documentary filmmaker Roger Ross Williams (Music by Prudence; Life, Animated) chose this historic setting to show that we have not come very far at all. Indeed, we seem to be back to square one. Whereas until the 1960s, it was forbidden for blacks to appear in white dinners to eat, or get to a white gas station, it is now legal but life-threatening. Poignantly, the film becomes poignant when Samaria Rice speaks. We are sitting with her at the table when she tells us that her 12-year-old son, Tamir, was killed by Cleveland police because he was playing with a fake gun in his own neighbourhood.
We even see the clip where he is shot. It is blatantly and horrifyingly, painfully, savage-making to see that the officers make no attempt to see if the child might pose a danger. They get out and shoot him. When Samaria Rice is called to the scene, she is not allowed to get close. Her son is now evidence. Even in the ambulance, she is not allowed to be in the back with him during his last minutes. She has to be in the front, as a passenger.
The dehumanisation of young Tamir is revolting. I admit that I had the urge to cry. Among the people in the diner where we are, tears are flowing. But after everything that has happened in the past few months, I don't allow myself to cry. The world has no use for a crying Karen. I have to turn my emotion into anger, only then can things change.
https://youtu.be/eg8XlfChttc.
The power of VR
Ross Williams' use of VR is powerful and effective. There is no escape from wherever you look, you are among the people in the diner in DC. This is no coincidence: there is also no escape from being black in America. As soon as you leave your home, you are in danger. You can be shot by your neighbours if you run. Or someone can call the police if you are bird watching and you want someone to leash her dog. And we know all too well that the police are not your best friend.
This VR film is a beautiful, aesthetic and well-documented work. It raises questions: where do we go with our empathy, how do we use it constructively? There is also an ethical question when white people watch violence against black people. What do we see, how do we watch? What for some viewers is a solidly lived trauma is for others an abstraction, a news item, a statistic.
The creator's responsibility?
Can film eliminate such a gap in perception? Can we really put ourselves in someone else's shoes? And does that then have a lasting effect? Should a filmmaker actually be expected to do that?
I don't think this is the responsibility of this, or any other filmmaker. Who should just make a good work, work whose urgency is clear. The rest is up to the viewer.
I firmly believe in film and VR as an empathy machine, but I also see a certain danger. In the most cynical case, suffering could be seen as entertainment. I also hold my heart when the Trumpians start using VR to show who all is wrong. Fortunately, for now, they have not had the talent to make such a powerful film.
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