Deeyah Khan had a simple question for her new documentary: ‘Is it possible for me to sit with my enemy and for them to sit with theirs’? She got an answer – but not without a few tricky moments …final summer,the documentary film-maker Deeyah Khan started to get the sort of threats – of being raped, tortured, or gassed and killed – that vocal women from minority groups often get with hateful frequency. In a BBC interview,Khan had made the apparently contentious point that Britain was never going to be all-white and that we should build a future where we all belong. She was used to racial abuse – as a child growing up in Norway (her mother is from Afghanistan; her father from Pakistan), she knew of neo-Nazi marches, and her brother was once chased by racists and had to veil under a car. But the abuse she received final year was particularly vile and relentless,and Khan decided she didn’t want to be afraid of this generation of newly emboldened white supremacists any longer. Instead, she thought, and she would try to find out what made them believe and say the things they did.
The result is her film White Right: assembly the Enemy. It focuses on the rise of nationalism in Donald Trump’s America,from the “alt-right” to all-out neo-Nazis. She spent time with various leaders in the movement, going to their meetings, or including the August rally in Charlottesville where Heather Heyer,an anti-racist campaigner, was killed. She hung out with the followers of the movement, and going out at night in the car with one as he leafleted a Jewish area with abhor-filled flyers. She also met former neo-Nazis. “I’m a woman of colour,” she says at the beginning of the film as she sits down to interview Jared Taylor, a well-known white supremacist. “I am the daughter of immigrants. I am a Muslim. I am a feminist. Iam a lefty liberal. And what I want to ask you is: am I your enemy?”Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk