The Whiteness Project

It is conducting “1,000 interviews with white people from all walks of life and localities in which they are asked about their relationship to, and their understanding of, their own whiteness.” The trailer:

The project got ridiculed on Twitter last week. Jessica Roy interviewed filmmaker Whitney Dow about the response:

The level of reaction I got [online] was, This is outrageous, what you’re doing. My response to it is:

What is outrageous about speaking the truth? The one video about the woman talking about the woman being afraid of black men and the statistics saying 40 percent of whites think black men are inherently violent: It’s a real fact. It’s an uncomfortable fact; it’s a strange, terrible fact; but why is saying that out loud so outrageous? I think that my goal is to get white people to sort of confront the disconnect between how they experience the world and the reality of the place they hold in the world. So far, I think it’s done a good job of creating these conversations.

Carla Murphy also spoke with Dow:

[Q.] I’m going to be frank. I’m not really interested in hearing white folks talk about race or whiteness. I’ve been a minority in majority-white spaces since I was 12 years old. I feel like I know what your subjects are going to say. Why should I take the time to watch?

[A.] I would say that people like you and me who have thought about race a lot and have been around and processed it, maybe that’s not who this project is for. But, again, I go back to all these women of color who’ve written me from Albuquerque to Australia, who’ve said it was really painful but incredibly cathartic to hear what white people say when they’re not in the room. That’s all I can say.

Interviews from the series can be viewed here.