How Jack Became Black is 2018 documentary about the issue of racial identity and what it means to choose.
I don’t really remember the first time I had to check the box. Surely it was done for me as a kid, and as an adult it was always an easy mark without any thought. What is my race? I am white, born to white parents from white grandparents. I check white. Done. However, for many, many others, and more so as time marches on, it’s not that easy. Being multi-racial and identifying as such, makes checking a box more than a challenge. In fact, it’s much, much more. The question is not ‘Which race am I?” but rather ‘Why does it matter?’
Exploring what that means has long been the center of debate and discourse, and now comes filmmaker Eli Steele‘s account, a deeply personal examination of what formally choosing a race means in our culture, where such practices began, why, and how it needs to evolve. Much of this is his story, at least his experiences, but it extends well beyond the impact of his choices, turning his lens on many who identify as mixed racial, feeling compelled to seek change in an archaic system that is long designed to limit most anyone who checks any box not labeled white.
Steele is deaf and Jewish, born from a mixed racial marriage who were themselves from mixed races. He is also a father, with two very young children, Jack and June. Jack is just entering public school and the only hurdle Steele is having with the applications are the racial identity choices. With a camera, he travels about the district inquiring about the reason he must choose and getting no answer that satisfies. As such, the title of the film offers the first choice he makes, but more so, how he came to do so and what happens next.
Still, How Jack Became Black is more than Steele’s story, narrator Justin Gordon journeying us through a vivid history of segregation and the birth of racial identity. We meet many people who identify as multi-racial and hear their stories where progress seems only incomplete, revealing a system that even through great civil change still holds onto institutional racism. The quest for establishing and displaying diversity, especially at the collegiate level – no matter the hopeful aspirations behind them – become ultimately loaded with consequences.
So what’s the big deal? Right? For a guy like me – a white man – the box on the form is a blink, something I’ve never thought about, nor what it really means once it’s checked. Probably half the point. However, what’s behind this is a system that aligns so many others into what’s referred often to as identity politics, where race masks character and leaves many feeling misrepresented and lacking individuality. How Jack Became Black examines what that labeling uncovers – even under the best intentions – digging into a troubling history where the difference in races have long established competition rather than unity, the narrative often that of versus.
As such, Steele spends a great deal of time on the Trayvon Martin case and the fervor over the media classification of George Zimmerman as white Hispanic, the surge of exposing if and what white privilege is, and the many voices who took to rising up in the aftermath of that shooting. Steele clearly tracks the concept and delivery of how skin color has divided so many, naturally condemning the source of white supremacy, while also bolstering the greatness of American ideals of individuality, even as this is so often cut off at the base in a culture where racial order strips that away.
Steele is a passionate man, his presence dominant yet never overshadowing the message. His journey from understanding the reasons for a race box on his child’s school application leading him on a long historical record that has him traveling across the country and then to his family’s homeland. He is a product of America’s incredibly disturbing and inspiring past, representative of countless others in the past, now, and soon to come. In the end, he quotes Ayn Rand, that the smallest minority is the individual, something that resonates throughout the film, and offers hope that even in a country committed to racial identification, we might best be known for who we are rather than what we are. How Jack Became Black is a mesmerizing and chilling experience, one that should help shape a growing national conversation.