MY FATHER’S NAME Director’s Statement

When I first heard Jan Frazier’s story, it hit me hard. Not only because of the stunning event at its heart, but for the earthshaking experience of discovering something unspeakable about someone you love — a dark secret that can never be illuminated by the person who carried it. That discovery is a profound emotional and spiritual experience, one that is shared by all too many people, including myself. How do we reckon with that? How do we make sense of the duality of good and evil in the same person?

With that as my initial motivation, I quickly discovered what I hadn’t originally taken into account: Jan’s personal story cannot be told independent of its uniquely American historical and social context, given that it has to do with the most charged and complex issue of our time: race. I also came to understand there is a conversation that is not sufficiently taking place among white people about our role in perpetuating racism.

“I thought I wasn’t racist,” Jan says at one point in the film. I can echo that. When I began working on “My Father’s Name” I had no idea that it would lead me to a hard but necessary assessment of my own whiteness and all of its implications. I have been the grateful beneficiary of the experience, wisdom and honesty of my Black team members and other colleagues and friends who have helped open my eyes to my own assumptions and the unquestioned patterns I’ve always lived with. This in turn has informed the film’s evolution into what it is now.

Every schoolchild in Germany learns about the Holocaust, and German society takes ongoing responsibility for the atrocities of its forebears. Conversely, the history of lynching in America has been consistently buried and misunderstood. Not by Black people but by white people. We have had the luxury to hold it at a distance, because we are not the ones being killed. Jan Frazier didn’t have to know about it — until the discovery of her father’s shameful past shined a glaring light on it and she could no longer look away.

I am well aware of the pitfalls of being a white person making a film about a white person talking about horrors perpetrated on Black people. To that end I brought on as advisors historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault and philanthropic advisor David Dodson. They gave me wise guidance and encouragement, and affirmed that the conversation, no matter how difficult and potentially inflammatory, must be furthered.