Video Transcript

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“I don’t like how he treated my son on one of his blogs,” wrote a friend’s mom on a Facebook post about me in 2017.

I stared at the post, unsure what she meant by the comment. I knew her son for years and consider him a good friend of mine, even if we disagreed about racial issues in our hometown of Grand Saline, TX. Finally, I responded: “What do you mean? Do you know the blog where I did this?”

A few minutes later she responded: “No, because you probably deleted it.” The conversation ended there.

I never imagined being considered an activist when I grew up in Grand Saline, TX, population 3,200. But that’s the nature of life. We never know who we will grow up to be, how our lives will be shaped, and how we might be affected by our environments.

Life changes, though. I also, for instance, never imagined that a white minister would light himself on fire to protest the racism of my hometown in 2014. I never knew that stakeholders in town would attempt to erase this truth from public knowledge. And, of course, I never knew that I would be the agent who first spread this story to news outlets. A week after Charles Moore died, I spammed 10 newspapers and news stations in the Dallas-Fort Worth and East Texas areas in order to try and get his story to the public. I succeeded.

I don’t think I ever set out to be anti-racist activist. As a kid, I wasn’t interested in issues of race. I loved writing short stories about the end of the world (I was a weird kid). Or playing video games or making videos with my video camera. I had a creative ability that often shined as a kid, but I never cared about issues of race. It was a non-starter for me. Rather, I felt forced into being an anti-racist activist. My community’s lack of racial awareness and their white supremacy made me want to resist them. I am a response to my environment.

In this video chapter, I reflect on being an anti-racist activist in my hometown and how I performed my activism through the creation of my documentary, Man on Fire, which critiques the white supremacy of Grand Saline. This activism brought forth public critiques of me and my racial and political ideologies. I focus on the creation of this activist art and these critiques to emphasize the importance of being a public scholar in your hometown—or how we can use our power as scholars in hopes to effect change with people we know and love.

I have written about this quite a few times before, but it is worth repeating: My life changed on June 23, 2014. On this day, a white minister, Charles Moore, drove to his hometown of Grand Saline and lit himself on fire as a means to protest the racism of the town. This story become the crux of the film Man on Fire and has been a major part of my scholarship over the last few years. Nonetheless, my life changed on that fateful day because my story became intertwined with Charles Moore’s. His death made me an activist in my hometown because I saw how quickly people wanted to erase what he did, transcribe ulterior motives to his act, and just forget he existed.

But that seemed so wrong to me. I wanted—I needed—people to remember.

I was the first person to contact the news media after the incident. Though the Grand Saline Sun newspaper ran an article in their paper that mentioned the death, it didn’t name Moore and only said he died “for the way things used to be around here in the past.” This pissed me off, especially since this piece hinted at a truth everyone in Grand Saline knew but didn’t name—Moore died for racism.

“This story only got to the Tyler Morning Telegraph,” a former friend wrote on a public Facebook page, “because of a self-righteous, uninformed, self-serving pseudo-academic that claims to be a ‘Grand Saline Native’ [sic] when he moved to Grand Saline halfway through his schooling. He used the town, defamed it and the people in it to promote his so-called scholastic work, which is of no value and no use to his fellow man.” His comment received multiple likes from people I care about. People began publicly questioning why I wanted to do this, why I wanted to stir up hate about the town. “You’re just going to hurt people,” one friend told me.

People in Grand Saline viewed my empathetic nature towards Charles Moore as an indictment of the entire community, labelling them all as racist. And in some sense, they were right. Since I define racism as a systemic problem in which those whom have power (or white people) subjugate those without power (people of color) via personal and institutional attacks and constraints, of course I view the community of Grand Saline as racist. Readings by critical race scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Patricia Williams taught me this. I saw the town’s culture produce this racism towards black people in neighboring communities and through personal attacks on my race. And since I want to share Moore’s story, my critical race theory perspective on race made it easy for people to peg me as an activist trying to destroy Grand Saline’s reputation.

In the process of first getting the Moore story into the public in 2014, to making the documentary in 2016 and 2017, and finally in having the film released on PBS in 2018, I have felt various degrees of tension in Grand Saline—in losing friends, being combative in interviews with townsfolk who “know” me, and having all of this take a deeply personal and emotional toll on my life. I assumed taking on this project might cause some rifts amongst friends and people in the town, but I could not imagine how drastically it would change my relationship with people there.

All of this turmoil came to fruition one evening during our last trip to shoot in Grand Saline. We had filmed a bonfire at a Grand Saline High School homecoming event, which caused the principal of the school to intervene and call the superintendent. I distinctly remember the people staring at me, their eyes showing how they viewed my presence as a betrayal. The next night, we went to a local restaurant in town to eat dinner after a long day of shooting. Though everyone in the building knew who we were—the town is small, remember?—we tried keeping a low profile. A waitress brought us our food and simply said, “What you are doing is wrong! You can’t just go around and film kids without permission. That is wrong.”

Joel and I told her about the laws for public filming and the distinctions between close-up shots and crowd shots, but it didn’t really matter. To her, what we were doing was completely wrong, and there was nothing we could say in that moment to change her mind.

Not everyone we talked to had bad things to say about us—most quite enjoyed our talks; but, it’s the bad ones that always stick with you. Sometimes it was the way people looked at you—like the eyes we got when trying to film a bingo game on Thursday evening. Other times, it was people attacking you on social media. One old “friend” wrote, “[James] doesn’t owe us anything. But…don’t be shocked when people assume things about you and your work.” Another old high school acquaintance called me “the real racist.” (Even looking this up on social media made me a bit nervous.) There were multitudes of people who were angry with us during the filming process, and I couldn’t help but feel further ostracized from the town every time we filmed.

At one point, during the homecoming parade in town, I didn’t even leave my car when we were filming because I was scared of the anger that was building in the community.

Friends I had known much of my life disappeared. Some unfriended me on social media. Some dropped off the face of the earth. We no longer texted. No longer traded phone calls. We were out of each other’s lives. Even worse, some went about trolling me on social media, letting people know that now that I have a Ph.D. and made a film on PBS, I was too good for them and thought all of them were “dumb hillbillies.” I never would make such claims, but many felt comfortable spreading this about me on social media and in other circles. It was easier to see me as an “other” who thought he was better than everyone else than simply someone who hated the racist ideologies often expounded in his hometown. And, in this way, I understood it.

But even these low points could never contend with the emotional highs, when people would reach out to me and say “thanks for doing this work.” One night, after a long weekend shoot, I received a Facebook message from someone I didn’t know from Grand Saline. She had recently graduated from high school. She told me that, while in high school, she had a child with a black boy her age and that her father kicked her out of the house because of this. I often thought about the ways I would be critiqued by those in Grand Saline, but I never imagined how people might respond positively.

Reflecting on these moments helps me see how I was thrust into the role of an anti-racist activist in my hometown but also—more importantly—why I believe fulfilling this role was important to me as a scholar of color.

I often ask myself where my responsibilities lie in my research. Am I beholden to just myself? My hometown? The public at large? I don’t think everyone who watches this video will have the same conclusion, but I will share my conviction: I feel most obligated to share the stories of others yes, but I am beholden to my own realities. My own truths.

In her work on feminist documentary filmmaking, Alexandra Hidalgo claims to take the “anti-Michael Moore approach” to interviewing subjects. She means that she “values the well-being of her participants over the final product.” Instead of building a narrative that bends and twists interviews, Hidalgo suggests actually caring for those being interviewed. I view Hidalgo’s work in relation to Sophie Tamas’ research on ethics and autoethnography. Tamas writes on the ethics of telling real stories, “Stories with purely malicious villains and innocent victims might divert and entertain, but they are not disruptive or real enough to create social change. If you want to play a villain well, you have to find the humanity in them; this is what makes the performance compelling.” Both Hidalgo and Tamas see themselves as ethically beholden to the people they are researching and interviewing. They hold truth and well-being of the people being interviewed over the stories they are telling.

However, research, filmmaking, and activism are never apolitical, even when attempting to be nuanced in one’s approach. That’s a truth. So, while I do feel obligated to let other people speak and have their voices be heard, I don’t have to remain unbiased. As someone who claims to be anti-racist, it would be unethical for me to not speak. And that is the divide we must bridge when performing as a researcher, activist, filmmaker—to be fair to our subjects while still positioning our own truths.

During Q&A talks after these events, I usually get the same question: “Are the people of Grand Saline really that racist?” I have a normal response now: It would have been easy to make a movie that painted Grand Saline as the most racist town in all of America, but instead we went more implicit with the argument. We wanted the people of Grand Saline to view the film and feel that it painted them accurately, and to constantly show explicit forms of racism would have been misleading. It wouldn’t have been real.

Overall, being an activist in your hometown is not easy work. You might lose your friends, family, and people who love you. You might be publicly ousted and critiqued by people you considered close. You might feel completely ostracized. But none of those issues hinder the absolute love you might receive from others who feel oppressed and hated because of their identities. Even in all the hate you might receive, that love in having a positive impact someone’s life outweighs them all and that, ultimately, makes all the difference.

References

Crenshaw, K. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43(6): 1241-1299.

Delgado, R. 1989. “Storytelling for Oppositions and Others: A Pleas for Marrative. Michigan Law Review 87(8): 2411-2441.

Hidalgo, A. 2017. Cámara Rtórica: A Feminist Filmmaking Methodology for Rhetoric and Composition. Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital P/Utah State UP.

Sanchez, J.C. & J. Fendelman dir.2018. Man on Fire United States: New Day Films.

Tamas, S. 2011. “Autoethnography, Ethics, and Making Your Baby Cry.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 11(3): 258–264.

Williams, P. 1991. The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.