Review: ‘Who We Are’ offers a searing view of racism in US

How did this lecture come about? Robinson explains that he became a father in 2011, when his sister-in-law died and her son, then 13, moved in. Suddenly, Robinson needed to teach a Black teen about racism. In educating himself, he says, he was stunned by what he himself — lucky enough to have a stellar education, including a Harvard law degree — didn’t know.

He began sharing his findings wherever he could — in community centers, churches, conference rooms. The directors, after hearing him speak, suggested a movie. Their resulting film is anchored by the 2018 lecture in New York’s historic Town Hall and filled out with archival footage, photographs and current-day interviews with the likes of 107-year-old Lessie Benningfield Randle, one of the last survivors of the Tulsa massacre, and Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner, whose death from a police chokehold became a rallying cry for Black Lives Matter. Robinson also argues briefly with a man holding a Confederate flag, who insists the Civil War had nothing at all to do with slavery.

At a slavery museum in Charleston, South Carolina, Robinson examines two pairs of shackles; one is adult-sized, the other toddler-sized. We also see an oak “hanging tree” — and later, photographs of white Americans standing next to the bodies of Black people who have been lynched, a sight Robinson says was once “normal and accepted” in America.