Tragic Comedy: Film focuses on fight to remove Confederate monuments
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Esther Schrader | Read the full piece here
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Friend,

It's been seven years since a movement began building in small
towns and big cities across the United States to take down Confederate
monuments, honorariums and symbols of all kinds. People have chained
themselves to statues, spent nights in the cold at candlelight vigils,
performed spoken-word poems and testified at city council meetings.

The activists - young, old, often led by people of color but
drawing from across the demographic spectrum - have faced
ridicule and hostility from political leaders at all levels. Many have
risked their lives when armed counterprotesters, some openly
affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan and a broad range of hate groups,
have fomented violence, beating protesters, torching their vehicles
and worse.

There doesn't seem to be anything funny about this movement.

But CJ Hunt, a comedian, director and former producer for The Daily
Show, took a journey into the world of the people who venerate
Confederate monuments and came out of it saying, "Hey, at some
point, you just gotta laugh."

Laugh, that is, at the absurdity, the irony, the - well, comedy
of the powerful and the entrenched trying so hard to deny a racially
progressive future for the United States by whitewashing the past. How
else, Hunt challenges viewers in a documentary that is at its heart
deadly serious, can you make sense of the sheer irrationality of a
country's veneration for a movement that literally sought to
destroy it?

Hunt's film, The Neutral Ground
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, was screened last month at the Southern Poverty Law Center's
Civil Rights Memorial Center
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in Montgomery, Alabama. In its recounting of the intense backlash
against a decision by New Orleans to take down four of the
city's most prominent Confederate monuments, the documentary is
poignant, impassioned, infuriating - and deeply absurd. In one
segment, a modern-day Confederate reenactor tells Hunt that "the
majority of the slaves" in the antebellum South "were not
abused."

In response, Hunt - himself Black and Filipino - just
stares at the camera, deadpan.

"The role of comedy is to try to help show absurdity, and
we're sort of at a point in this country where white backlash is
at its highest," Hunt said. "There's an element of
absurdity to that. And I'm trying to use comedy to highlight
that and to make that really clear."

A former middle school teacher, Hunt embarked on the film in 2015
while he was still living in New Orleans. That year, amid what was
then characterized as a period of racial reckoning, the city council
voted 6-1 to remove four prominent Confederate monuments. In the film,
released last year on Juneteenth, Hunt tracks the backlash that
ensued. It took two years for the statues to finally be removed.

READ MORE
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In solidarity,

Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center

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working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy,
strengthen intersectional movements, and advance the human rights of
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