film

These two highly complementary films explore racism in America in innovative and interesting ways. Take Your Bags, pictured, is an 11-minute short directed by Sanjeev Chatterjee from 1998. It uses the perspective of a child and the metaphor of stolen bags to confront the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. Drawing parallels between stolen luggage and stolen lives, it makes its point with simplicity, brevity and wit.

The remarkably named The KKK Boutique Ain't Just for Rednecks is a full-length documentary from 1994 by Camille Billops and James Hatch. As they wrote of their film: "Even as late as a hundred years ago, discrimination on the basis of race was considered a natural and even desirable trait for humans to possess. We Americans have tried to ignore it, deny it, suppress it, to contain it, tolerate it, legislate it, mock it, exploit it." To try to counteract this, they made this excellent catalogue of vignettes based on archival images, testimonies, sketches and more.