Black people are still calling for justice for Breonna Taylor. Cannon Hinnant, a 5-year-old white boy, was shot in the head and killed by a 25-year-old Black man in North Carolina last week for allegedly riding his bike on his lawn. Donald Trump is attacking Kamala Harris with another birther conspiracy. And these are just A FEW of today’s trending headlines.
It’s safe to say the U.S. is a mess. And if everyone would be honest, it always has been. The difference is, now we have social media – and with the continual moral decay of the nation, racial strife is more pronounced.
It’s like Will Smith said, “Racism isn’t getting worse, it’s getting filmed.”
It’s the underlying reason Maurice Simmons, founder of Task Media Films, made the award-winning short film “Bill 2/29.” The fictional movie is set in the near future towards the end of Donald Trump’s second term as president.
Written in 2016 prior to the November election, the movie imagines what it would be like if the country was legally segregated again, but this time with specific states designated for Black Americans and white Americans to live in.
“In 2015, when Donald Trump was considering running for president and when he finally announced his campaign, I noticed that a lot of his conversation was kind of strange,” Simmons told Moguldom in an exclusive interview. “He was making comments that I felt were inappropriate and inciting problems. As I read all of the internet trolling where people were agreeing with him about closing the borders, sending Muslims back, not allowing people into the country and all of this divisive talk, I said if this guy becomes president, I could actually see him separating people by race.”
The idea snowballed and “Bill 2/29” was born. It offers an “alternative look at America after a new law is passed and signed by President Trump mandating that Black and white people separate and move to different states,” according to the film’s synopsis.
Over the course of 23 minutes, we meet two couples – one Black, one white – who are neighbors in Austin, Texas. Since Texas is one of the states designated for Black people, the white husband is furious that he has to leave his family’s home.
They explore whether or not the government mandate is right and ask themselves and each other tough questions they’ve avoided the entire time they were neighbors.
Both couples are doing their best to navigate life before the swift-approaching deadline when it will become illegal for whites and Blacks to reside together in the same states.
Available for viewing on Task Media’s YouTube channel and Amazon video in some areas, “Bill 2/29” could have been written yesterday. Eerily – considering Hinnant’s recent murder – one of the conflicts Simmons covers in the film is that of neighbors arguing over the Black couple’s son, Zaire, always leaving his bike in the white couple’s driveway.
Simmons said people thought the movie was both risky and prophetic since he filmed it before Trump even won the U.S. presidency.
“A close friend told me, ‘If you make a film about Trump separating people by race and he doesn’t become president, your film is not going to have a long shelf life.’ I’m thinking well, I still feel that he’s causing so many problems right now, I was compelled to make the film even though I was risking the fact that he may not have won the election,’” Simmons said.
“In fact, I didn’t think he had a chance to win the election, like a lot of people, and when he did win people thought I was like a prognosticator,” Simmons continued. “They asked, ‘How did you know that he was going to win?’ I said I didn’t, but I thought if he did, this is the direction we may end up in and behold, we’re not really far from it three-and-a-half years later.”
A retired veteran, Simmons served as a combat cameraman, broadcast journalist and news director. He has seen a lot while stationed in places like Bosnia, Kosovo and Panama. But the brazen rhetoric he heard in his own country when Trump ran for president in 2016 greatly disturbed him.
“Even though Trump is very vocal, what alerted me was the amount of support he was getting. I always felt that this country had a lot of problems, but once he emboldened people to say what they really felt, I began to hear all of the same sort of noise he was making from other people,” Simmons said.
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 73: Jamarlin Martin
Jamarlin makes the case for why this is a multi-factor rebellion vs. just protests about George Floyd. He discusses the Democratic Party’s sneaky relationship with the police in cities and states under Dem control, and why Joe Biden is a cop and the Steve Jobs of mass incarceration.
Born in Chicago and raised in Los Angeles, Simmons, 66, knows full well the history America has with rampant racial injustice. He believes the film, however, will spur people to be very thoughtful about the consequences of racism, complacency and complicity.
“Today, a film like this I feel says many things for people on both sides,” Simmons told Moguldom. “I think what people will get from watching it is they can see how easily things can happen. And I feel if we allow things to happen and not get engaged we can easily find ourselves back in 1951, 1941, 1931 or 1831. So I think watching the film gives people a wakeup call that complacency can really, really set us back.”
As for his stance on whether separatists are right who believe having two Americas, Simmons said he will allow people to make their own decisions on that.
“When I was making the film, I was trying to decide whether or not I was going to make a decision on whether separating races was a good idea or a bad idea; and my hope was not to make that decision for anybody. My hope was to lay out the possibilities,” Simmons said.
Simmons did share a story a teacher told him about two of her elementary school students, one Black and one white, who she had to separate because they kept fighting.
“They didn’t realize how much they liked each other until they were separated and when they were separated, it was almost like they yearned for each other,” Simmons said the teacher told him. “In reality, we may fight quite a bit, but we also may be joined at the hip. We probably would find that we could not exist without each other.”
He said he is unnerved when white people make excuses for other white people exhibiting racist behavior.
“One of the things I used to really get upset about is when I hear white people tell Black people that other white people aren’t racist,” Simmons said. “They’ll validate a white person and say ‘Oh he’s not racist,’ and I’m going, ‘How do you know as a white person that this guy is not racist. That’s unnerving to me.”
Initially, Simmons said he’d hoped to turn the film into a five-part mini-series to do a deeper dive into the concept.
“I wrote a fairly long treatment that talks about what life would look like if we decided to go that route,” Simmons said. “I would love to further explore that because there are arguments for both sides. When I was growing up some people felt separate but equal was great as long as it was separate, but equal. Obviously, it was separate but unequal and that’s where the problem started. You can make an argument for both sides.”
Highlighting the difference between his generation and younger activists today, Simmons said the film may be received differently depending on the audience.
“This generation has a totally different perspective than my generation did,” Simmons said. “Now in the current climate, where I see so many white folks getting involved in Black Lives Matter, while that did happen in the 1960s, it didn’t happen at the same level and with the same energy we see today. So they probably wouldn’t look at “Bill 2/29” the way my generation did.”
Ultimately, Simmons said he hopes the film moves people to take action and get engaged politically.
“If I could sum up ‘Bill 2/29’s message in a sentence, I would say it’s a film I hope will inspire people to not be complacent and get engaged in the decision-making of their lives and communities,” Simmons said. “I would ask we get more engaged in local politics because if we don’t, we’re probably destined to find ourselves in a situation we did not expect and did not want.”
He encouraged Americans overall to not miss the moment.
“We got a very serious wakeup call the last three-and-a-half years and it is just a wakeup call, it is not the end of everything,” Simmons said. “So my hope is that we take heed to this message we’ve gotten and let’s really start to look seriously at how we approach each other racially. I’m actually very, very confident we’re able to do it now, especially in light of George Floyd. I’m very, very encouraged by what I’ve seen in the last four months.”
