‘Who We Are’ offers a searing view of racism in America

“If you’ve ever owned a slave, please raise your hand,” Jeffery Robinson asks a live audience at the beginning of “Who We

Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America,” a searing documentary based on a lecture he’s spent a decade perfecting.

Obviously, nobody in the auditorium raises a hand. This is 2018 New York City! But the few seconds that follow the question are probably the only chance these audience members have to put some distance between themselves and the country’s sorry record of racial oppression. No, explains Robinson, slavery may not be our fault. But it is “our shared history.”

And then Robinson, a longtime criminal defense lawyer and former deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, launches his harrowing journey through centuries of institutionalized racism. Along the way he points out both the well known and the less widely known No matter how much you think you already

know, you’re bound to learn new things from “Who We Are,” directed by Emily and Sarah Kunstler. And to be stunned, at some point.

How did this lecture come about? Robinson explains that he became a father in 2011, when his sister-in-law died and her son, then 13, moved in. Suddenly, Robinson needed to teach a Black teen about racism. In educating himself, he says, he was stunned by what he himself — lucky enough to have a stellar education, including a Harvard law degree — didn’t know.

“Who We Are,” a Sony Pictures Classics release, has been rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for “thematic content, disturbing images, violence and strong language — all involving racism.” Running time: 117 minutes.