Mourning the Creation of Racial Categories patron
Patron is a platform for users to gain access to MCRC exclusive content online through various tiers. As a user, you will have the opportunity to support the MCRC project, and be rewarded with access to videos, artwork, and an online community.
At the highest level, you will have access to streaming all of the MCRC Project documentaries.
Film 1: The Categories Black and White
This artist-narrated film showcases the power of the arts to help audiences engage with race. The artistic engagement brings attention to the laws and financial incentives enacted in 17th-century Virginia, which planted the seeds of racial categorization. These unjust laws and incentives, which thrived through the Jim Crow era, were so important that even the most intimate of human bonds were severed to sustain them.
Film 2: Let Our Loss be Heard
Let Our Loss Be Heard tells the tragic story of an enslaved family—Robert and Margaret Garner and her four children. According to newspaper reports, two of whom appeared “almost white.” Our understanding of race and of the racial categories Black and White is strengthened with the telling of this tragic story. Telling the story of the Garner family also allows us to explore and process the emotional pain of the dividing of people into Black and White categories.
Film 3: let our loss be heard, the dance
The tragic story of Margaret and Robert Garner and her four children is told through a performance of dance. The dance offers a wordless narrative that inspires audiences to emotionally engage with one woman and her family’s tragedy and connect their story to a larger national tragedy of the black-white divide.
NEW! Short Film Series
NEW! Short Film Series: The Category White
The Category White includes a series of scenes exploring the White category in relationship to the Black and other categories. Each scene tells a story about people who, to live as White, denied and severed ties with family, ancestors, and friends. The focus is on the categories of White and Black because that racial divide is the most fundamental. Understanding how the Black-divide was forged sets the stage for forthcoming films on the other racial categories.
NEW! SHORT FILM Series: Why White?
The first film in the “Category White” series is Why White? (40 minutes) It centers around a White-classified male who questions why he has to check the White box. This character, in dialogue with the personified White category, sorts through the meaning of white and whiteness as a system. The film’s message is that White classified peoples must wrestle with their racial identity and the weight of their category’s history if they are to constructively participate in dialogue and in making real change.
Future films: I’m White Like You, Right Mom?
The second film in the “Category White” series, centers around a White-appearing mother and her Black-appearing daughter. The mother is struggling with how to respond to her daughter’s question, “I’m white like you, right mom?” The mother, in dialogue with the personified White category, learns how it is that a mother and daughter can be assigned to different racial categories. She wrestles with the weight she brings into the mother-daughter relationship.
Future films: The Racial Categories Forced Between Black and White
In the US, preoccupation with the categories Black and White forced the other categories to position themselves between the two. MCRC tells stories of peoples who resisted and negotiated their positioning between Black and White to become legally recognized as Asian, Hispanic, Native American-Alaskan Native , Native Hawaiian-Other Pacific Islander.
“There is the artwork that you physically make but there’s also the journey that happens on the inside.
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