Works

Traveling While Black

A story about community

Experience

Virtual Reality

From

Release year: 2019
What we did

Distribution
Partners

Felix & Paul Studios
Traveling While Black Inc.
Oculus

Traveling While Black is a cinematic virtual reality experience that immerses viewers in the long history of movement restrictions imposed on African Americans, as well as the creation of safe spaces within our communities.

Infinity Experiences Traveling While Black IMG1

About
the experience

Academy Award winner Roger Ross Williams and Emmy Award-winning Felix & Paul Studios' film transports viewers to historic Ben's Chili Bowl restaurant in Washington DC.

Viewers share an intimate series of moments with several of Ben's patrons as they reflect on their experiences of restricted movement and race relations in the U.S.

Confronting the way we understand and talk about race in America, Traveling While Black highlights the urgent need to not only remember the past but to learn from it, and to facilitate a dialogue about the challenges minority travellers still face today.

Director's statement

"Traveling While Black was inspired by the Negro Motorist Green Book—a survival guide written by Victor Green, first published in 1936—that African American travelers relied on to avoid brutal discrimination. It listed safe places that would fulfill their basic needs and was used throughout the 40s, 50s, and 60s.

This was a time when travel for Black people was a matter of life and death. For me, the project started as a way to talk about this forgotten period in history. But the more I began to think about the past, I realized that not a lot has changed today. I thought of Henry Louis Gates being harassed while standing on his front porch, Ving Rhames being held at gunpoint in the doorway to his home, and Tamir Rice—a child—who was shot and killed in a playground in his own neighbourhood.

These and countless other incidents remind me that the risk we face just leaving our homes, and our need for safe spaces, are just as prevalent today as they were during the days of the Green Book."

"As a Black person, you feel a sense of relief when you enter a safe space and you don’t have to be on guard. We're often always on guard. When I walk down the street—especially if I see a police officer—I tense up. If I'm driving somewhere and a cop car starts to follow me, I get nervous. There's a violent history that comes with traveling while Black in America, and as a Black person, you carry that history with you.

Traveling While Black is a way to revisit that history, but it’s also a way to talk about the present—and hopefully start conversations about solutions for the future.

We started this project eight years ago as a play in Washington, D.C., produced by Bonnie Nelson Schwartz and starring the late, great Julian Bond. We then spent several years collecting and filming stories of African American travel before deciding that virtual reality was the best platform for this film.

I chose VR because I felt it was a fresh way to have a profound conversation about race in America through a genuinely immersive lens. When you experience this documentary in VR, it's all around you—you can't escape it. In the same way we can't escape our Blackness, or the reality of being Black in America, I didn't want people to be able to escape the experience they’re having when they watch Traveling While Black. I wanted them to be fully immersed—and that’s something only VR can offer.

Victor Green, the author of the Green Book, wrote: “There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States.

While the Green Book is no longer published, the need for resources and safe spaces still remains to this day. There is still an ongoing crisis in America—traveling while Black is still a matter of life and death.”

—Roger Ross Williams