In 2015, I was living in New Orleans and publishing my first piece of satire: 5 Hot New Designs for the Confederate Flag. The article distilled my anger about lawmakers who—even in the wake of the Charleston Massacre—still thought removing the confederate flag from South Carolina’s capitol was something we needed to debate. When New Orleans city council announced they would vote on the removal of 4 confederate monuments in New Orleans, I wanted to make a comedy short reprising the satirical voice I used in 5 Hot New Designs to capture the absurdity of white New Orleaians willing to say OUT LOUD that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery. We filmed for a full year before I realized the real takedown isn’t poking fun at misinformed people waving a confederate flag at the stoplight; it's investigating the century of propaganda designed to make those people so misinformed. For that, we’d need at least 82 minutes.

On one hand, I am putting sugar in the medicine. Throughout the writing and the edit, I asked myself: how do I keep skittish white audiences in their chair? The humor is partly meant to ease viewers’ anxiety about heading into a documentary that requires some deep reckoning and self-reflection. When people say “this movie is so accessible” I know that this is partly due to a few petty jokes about Alexander Stephens’s dry-ass lips. On the other hand, humor is the only language capable of expressing certain levels of horror and absurdity. When you’re watching this movie, there are times where you’ll witness something so horrific or ignorant that you say to yourself: I...have no words. When that happens to me, I often reach for humor.

I always planned to be on screen; I just had no idea what that requires in a documentary. In our earliest footage I was just mimicking the style of correspondents on late night comedies. I screened that footage for my friends at the BIPOC filmmaker collective Firelight Media, and they quickly informed me that the conventions of late night TV don’t work for documentary. Whereas late night correspondents are able to play a character, documentary audiences would expect me to reveal something true about myself. Even more daunting: apparently, movies require protagonists to change. With dread and frustration, I slowly accepted that I would have to learn to tell the truth about myself on screen, and we would have to film for long enough that—god willing—something in me changed. I frequently turned to my producer Darcy McKinnon and whined “So I just have to go to all these places, and feel messed up inside, and say aloud what I’m feeling, and that’s a movie?” Kindly, Darcy reminded me “yes, that’s a movie.”