Both “ An Inconvenient Truth” and “Who We Are” call for urgent foundational changes in how we live our lives, and neither film is the dry lecture it might seem to be upon initial glance.

Just as Al Gore detailed the inconvenient truth of global warming and the devastating impact it is currently having on our planet, Robinson is sharing a mightily uncomfortable one that the subsequent years have only magnified. Despite receiving the best schooling that the American education system could offer, Robinson was shocked by just how much was left out of the history books, thus inspiring his titular one man show, which we see him performing on Juneteenth 2018 at New York City’s Town Hall Theater. It was his “unicorn parents” combined with pure luck that Robinson credits for the road that led him to graduate from Harvard Law School and serve as a deputy legal director of the ACLU. Robinson vividly recalls how their next door neighbor was about to bring them his cherished dessert of chocolate chip cookies, until she realized that his family was not, in fact, “the help.” This resulted in Robinson’s family, not unlike the one in Hansberry’s play, purchasing a new house in a white community, thus ensuring that he and his brother would receive the good Catholic education their parents desired for them. Martin Luther King, Jr., which occurred in Robinson’s hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, before the civil rights leader had the chance to deliver a speech entitled, “Why America May Go to Hell.” Soon afterward, the homes in the Black neighborhood where Robinson’s family lived were bought up, prompting his father to make a deal with the developer.

One of the key historical instances of this recurring setback is the assassination of Dr. “We have decided to move into our house because my father-my father-he earned it for us, brick by brick.”-Walter Lee Younger ( Sidney Poitier) in Lorraine Hansberry’s masterpiece, “A Raisin in the Sun”Ī recurring visual utilized by speaker Jeffery Robinson in Emily and Sarah Kunstler’s sobering documentary, “Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America” is that of a ball reaching a tipping point, mere centimeters away from achieving real progress until it is forced to slide backward.

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