The Neutral Ground
There’s a moment in CJ Hunt’s “The Neutral Ground” that gets to the painful truth with regards to America’s much-needed reckoning with its history of white supremacy and Black subjugation. It takes place after the tragic events in Charlottesville in 2017, when white supremacists rallied against the removal of a Confederate monument, and one counter-protester was killed. Hunt was at Charlottesville, and was shaken by what he saw. He is talking to his father, and his father likens America’s inability to shake its white supremacist tendencies to alcoholism, where real change will not happen until you admit the issue. Such as it is with those who hang on to the legacy of the Old South they grew up with.
“The Neutral Ground” begins in 2015, as the city of New Orleans votes to have four Confederate monuments taken down. We see the council meetings, the contentious rhetoric, and the delay in removal stemming from challenges to the ruling. At first, Hunt- a comedian- begins to look at the subject with a wry sense of humor, but as the fight gets drawn out, and more tense, he realizes there’s a lot more than needs to be told in this story, most importantly- how the myth of the Civil War being about “States Rights” started, and how public Confederate monuments became a standard practice in America.
If you have been paying even a little bit of attention to the rise of white supremacy sentiment again in America over the past six years, a lot of what Hunt’s film will tell you in terms of the building of the revisionist history of the Old South not as insurrectionists, but as losers of a “Lost Cause,” you will be familiar with. It’s the way Hunt- a Black Pilipino- has his own eyes opened, at times, that make it feel vital yet again. A week ago, I was in Savannah, Georgia for vacation, and you see the Old South out in the open there, although some of the tours we did tried to be clear-eyed about the southern history. Plenty of public monuments, plenty of stars and bars merchandise on sale, and a lot of feeling like they still have some shit to work out in terms of the South’s history. Hunt gets that experience up close and personal as he documents the fight over New Orleans’s monuments.
No documentary can cover the full breadth of America’s racist history. “The Neutral Ground” doesn’t try to, but what it does do is show the ways how honoring the dead soldiers of the Confederacy, whom were not given the same respect as Union soldiers, turned into attempts to reassert white power over the now-freed Black population. The whitewashing of the South’s desire to preserve slavery from textbooks, the myth of “taken care of” slaves and “benevolent” masters, the construction of monuments outside of cemeteries as a way of undermining Reconstruction, and even modern day ways of doing so in the form of Civil War re-enactments and less-than-honest historical tellings. There’s a plantation museum in New Orleans that isn’t a house tour, but meant to represent how slave life really was, including a chilling memorial to a slave uprising in 1811 that is unnerving, but also important. Of course, for many people, that’s a distortion of the truth they’ve been told over the years. “The Neutral Ground” is coming out at a time when conservatives are railing about the dangers of Critical Race Theory. Hunt’s film shows why it is necessary, and should have happened sooner. Unfortunately, too many in this country are not quite ready to admit that we need help with our addiction to the myths we were told growing up, and that it was all of us- not just people in the South- who were complicit in spinning them.
