Journalist and author Dani McClain considers a deceptively difficult question: are we witnessing more overt racism in America—or are smartphones simply making visible incidents that once happened beyond the camera?
Emerging from a conversation around her book We Live for the We, the film explores visibility, technology and the persistence of racism in America, asking what it means when experiences that were once easily denied can now be recorded and shared with the world.
This HBG Films story emerged organically during a remote interview with Dani McClain conducted during the COVID era. While discussing We Live for the We and her work as a journalist covering race, our conversation moved toward the apparent prevalence of racist incidents in America.
That led me to ask a larger question: were we actually seeing more racism, or were smartphones simply allowing us to witness behavior that had always been there?
McClain’s response opened up a conversation I immediately recognized as a film in its own right. I shaped that exchange into a standalone short, using the immediacy of our discussion as the foundation for a broader examination of racism, visibility and the role technology plays in documenting experiences that might otherwise go unseen.
Like the other HBG Films stories, the film began not with a predetermined concept, but by listening closely enough to recognize when an interview had become something more.
