At first, I cannot deny, the setup had me gritting my teeth. In response to George Floyd’s killing by a police officer in 2020, young white film-maker Rob Bliss released a YouTube video “Holding a Black Lives Matter Sign in America’s Most Racist Town” – a largely self-explanatory title, though the mayor and other officials of Harrison, Arkansas registered their objections to the accusation – which quickly went viral. White Man Walking, released to commemorate the fifth anniversary of Floyd’s death, takes things a step further. Or several hundred thousand steps, I suppose, given that it covers a 1,500-mile walk by Bliss from the civil rights museum in Mississippi, through the Deep South and on to Washington DC – arriving just before the 2020 election – while holding a Black Lives Matter sign and inviting people to walk with him.
The premise, Bliss’s apparent delicacy and ignorance (the N-word is a frequent part of the responses his presence elicits and he reels. “They say it so quickly, so easily. It’s hard to believe there are still people who hold such extreme views”) and self-righteousness (“Steering some southerners away from that way of thinking won’t be easy”) are initially off-putting. The opening minutes of the film are suffused with a sense of white saviourism and the kind of sanctimonious liberalism that did for the Democrats in the last election.
