Film Review: Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America (2020)
Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America (2020) © PBS
This historical spotlight on the enormous changes brought by the advent of automobiles from the African American point of view was the subject of the fictionalized “GREEN BOOK” by Peter Farrelly in 2018. While that film was a single story of a particular moment in time, this comprehensive documentary provides archival details of how we arrived there on the way to where we are now, where “Driving While Black” has assumed a far more lethal and urgent tone. It should enrage and shame all white Americans who refuse to understand the roots of today’s racial inequities and swelling emotional protests. The film provides crucial facts which can lead to understanding and compassion around our current unrest.
Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America (2020) © PBS
While the automobile provided all Americans with a welcome and new-found freedom of movement, for the African Americans, traveling in cars was also a way of experiencing new vistas of racial bias and very real danger. Navigating the rocky shoals of humiliating Jim Crow “Whites Only” policies and violent, lawless hatred added a new dimension to obstacles for emancipated Black Americans on their way to better lives or merely exercising their legal rights to travel for work or visit family. All states had differing laws and “codes” of behavior as well as hotbeds of virulent bigotry, which generated the necessity of the “Green Book”, the Zagat of restaurants, motels, food shops, and even gas stations which would willingly serve Black people. Some areas had curfews for Black travelers who ignored them at their peril.
Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America (2020) © PBS
The effect of all of this resulted in Black motorists having to travel fully equipped in order to be able to sleep in their cars and carry enough food as well as extra gas if necessary. The individual stories chronicled are a painful, mortifying and shocking oral history. The fact that Jim Crow laws have been abolished, does not mean that the sentiment behind them has been erased. It is safe to say, that it has merely morphed into institutionalized racism in the form of mass incarceration, job and housing inequities and most glaringly, police brutality and senseless murders of unarmed Blacks without consequences for the perpetrators or justice for the victims.
Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America (2020) © PBS
The fact that so many fatal police shootings occur during minor traffic stops gives the phrase “driving while Black” its ominous truth and places it clearly in a context of a trajectory which shoots down any lofty notions of a “post racial” America. The coffin would seem to be nailed shut by the Trump presidency, which has liberated the bigots and violent racists to act out on their worst instincts with impunity. The film is so well done and compelling that anyone who is not one of “them” will have their blood boiling with righteous anger. It makes living in denial a lot more difficult. It is essential viewing on PBS.org.
