Marco Williams was intentional in his ways of pursuing social justice in his film Banished. The ways he framed the issue of the ethnic cleansing of Black people from cities within the United States were rendered not only visible but contemporarily relevant.
For example, in the segment located in Arkansas, Williams includes a scene of a racial relations task force discussing racial issues in Harrison City. In this scene, whether it was intentional or not, there was a presence of only white people in the room. The irony of this scene speaks to two issues: one being that there are no people of color in the room there to mediate or support the methods of the task force. The second is that throughout the entire documentary up until this point, Williams engages with both Black familial descendants of the banished peoples and the white people that live within those towns. The presence of only white people in a racial relations task force speaks to the problem of not only diverse representation, but of privileged (white) people being the ones in society that have the power to influence the reconstruction of systems and providing reparations to the groups that have been disenfranchised by white supremacist systems.
In this case, there is an expressed interest in doing right by the minority groups of Arkansas but nothing greater than surface level approaches. For example, there is a “need for diversity” and stride toward a better reputation for Arkansas through providing scholarships to Black students in the pursuit of higher education, but not as much as a grave marker for the Black woman that the scholarship is dedicated to. The invisibility of Black people and the white supremacist ideologies that forced them from their homes is incredibly relevant to Williams documentary and these ideas were portrayed in both scenes very clearly to me in a way that was not as overt as threatened violence, but a covert form of violence that silences minorities and hides from accountability.
