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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, was screened last month at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial Center 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.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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