America to Me
Docuseries: Starz; 10 episodes (4 reviewed), Aug. 26, 9 p.m. Starring: Jada Buford, Charles Donalson, Ke’shawn Kumsa, Terrence Moore, Tiara Oliphant, Chanti Relf
Most documentaries aim to stun audiences by building up to revelations that will explode preconceptions. Often, they focus on a single catastrophic or otherwise pivotal event — a war, a movement, a victory — to reveal its ripple effects. But “America to Me” succeeds by taking a quieter, slyly bruising approach in order to match the timbre of its fraught subject material, exploring how intersections of race, class and privilege become grueling everyday realities. It’s a slower burn, but it proves no less searing.
Director Steve James (“Hoop Dreams”) and his team followed several black and biracial students throughout a year at Oak Park and River Forest High, a competitive public school nestled in a Chicago suburb. The school prides itself on being liberal and diverse; nonetheless, it doesn’t understand how to best serve its nonwhite population. White teachers are shocked to hear their black and biracial students endure the kind of outright racism that literally announces itself to their faces. Take the football team, whose members regularly get slurs spit at them by white competitors as an “intimidation tactic.”
But “America to Me” mostly tries to untangle the more surreptitious knots of implicit bias. It shines a light on the obstacles black and biracial kids confront just due to the way white people perceive them — not to mention the blind spots of well-meaning liberals who balk whenever anyone suggests they’re not paragons of progressive virtue.
To show how deep and banal the problems have become, “America to Me” embeds with students, teachers and parents. Among the dozen kids are Tiara, a cheerleader with a huge smile and bigger dreams, and Ke’shawn, a wisecracking junior who meets his instructors’ frustration with a practiced shrug. Chanti expresses raw feelings about gender fluidity and a toxic relationship through spoken word. Withdrawn Terrence finds solace in his hoodie; Charles, in music so loud it drowns out anyone trying to grab his attention.
Their parents come from a range of backgrounds but are united in their desire to see their kids succeed — which is why, as they say with varying degrees of enthusiasm, they wanted them placed at Oak Park. Still, all grapple with what it means to have their black or biracial kids go to a school where the white teachers insist they “understand their experience” while the black teachers have to toe a constantly shifting line.
Sometimes, it’s hard not to wonder what “America to Me” — which is, after all, helmed by a white man — might look like if directed by someone who did understand the kids’ experience, such as their biracial English teacher, whose frustration and empathy radiates from the screen. What would it have looked like if the kids were speaking to people whose lives hewed closer to their own? What would have made the final cut?
It’s impossible to say for sure — and to be fair, this isn’t a new conundrum for those trying to document situations they’ve never lived through. “America to Me” mostly avoids the trap of making any single person stand for some grand truth. Instead, the series uses its astonishing amount of time and access to show the larger context of its subjects’ lives, shading in the full breadth of their struggles — past, present and potential future — to reveal an undeniable bigger picture of how racial bias functions in America.
Showing an isolated racist comment is one thing; revealing how deeply racism is embedded in our culture — even in places where people say they recognize it — is another, much harder task that “America to Me” tackles with patience, compassion and crucially, a willingness to let its subjects speak for themselves.