The most maddening of Jones’ critiques, however, is the accusation of Knight’s “epic mansplaining”. Jones writes: “There’s a cringeworthy scene where he teaches Rachel to read the words on a barrel of a Remington rifle. Then, in an act of epic mansplaining, he teaches her to shoot it. It’s ghastly if you’ve read about the actual Rachel Knight or seen the photograph that shows her to have been a remarkably tough and independent woman you’d be foolish to mess with.”



Here Jones seems to be implying that “remarkably tough and independent” women must also necessarily know how to fire a gun. There’s no doubt that Rachel was a badass whose remarkable skills and extensive knowledge of herbalism, the Mississippi swamplands and her cunning ability to steal food from the very plantation that enslaved her are what “kept Knight’s fledgling community going” as Jones puts it, but does that have to mean she also knew how to use a rifle? Short answer: No. The long answer is twofold: 1.) It is very unlikely that slave-owners taught her or any of their slaves how to use any sort of firearm. For obvious reasons. 2.) Her badassery is not diminished because Knight, a soldier, taught her something she didn’t know.



Jones does, however, make one valid critique about the film as a piece of art that falls short of being as impactful or entertaining as perhaps it could be. Jones argues that Ross “keeps jumping the narrative ahead to catch up with Knight’s grandson in the 1940s.” While the purpose of this time-hop (Knight’s “quarter-black” grandson’s miscegenation trial) is clear, Jones is correct that, “with all that’s going on in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras in an already overburdened movie, it’s maddening to have to keep visiting the twentieth century.” This is about as fair and solid a critique as Jones makes in her entire review. Perhaps the courtroom battle could have opened the film’s narrative, thereby providing a lens through which the audience could then watch the uninterrupted tale of Newton Knight. Or perhaps the time-hop between centuries could have be omitted altogether.

Meanwhile, Newkirk’s unsparing criticisms of the film center around (and are confused by it seems) his profound disapproval of McConaughey’s portrayal of Newton Knight as a hardcore anti-racist radical (which he was) committed to uniting poor disenfranchised whites and runaway slaves in the fight against the wealthy white-supremacist Confederate south.

“Wait, how is this a bad thing?” we wondered. Isn’t it a decidedly good thing that there now exists a film about white people participating in real struggles for liberation alongside those who’ve been trying to get free? This isn’t Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side – the ultimate white savior movie – saving a Black kid from the projects because she feels sorry for him. This is a film that tells the true story of a poor white guy who believed in and spent the better half of his life fighting against all odds for true collective liberation – economic and racial – not just because he was morally compelled to by his “wokeness,” but because he wanted an end to his own exploitation too.

But to Newkirk, being “the wokest white dude” seems to be a wrong, even offensive thing to be. Implicit in this “accusation” is the belief that the only real role for white people in ending white-supremacy is that of being guilt-ridden, Tim Wise-quoting, tokenizing cheerleaders and we wholeheartedly disagree. We need more Newton Knights, not fewer.

Likewise, Newkirk’s aesthetic criticism flows directly from his political positions. In turning his attention to the director’s technical choices he declares that, “The film loses its narrative way and becomes a mashup of vignettes around this point, but the vignettes each recall some real-world commentary on race and current events.” We see it differently. Rather than “losing its way,” the film draws out two important lessons. The first is that racism is deep-rooted, systemic, and long-lasting. The other is that interracial unity is key in the fight to overcoming it. Newkirk essentially argues this on accident, but misses the conclusion because of his faulty premise. And it happens more than once.

Newkirk asserts that despite the fact that voter-intimidation, lynchings, and massacres are perpetrated against black people: “...it’s Knight who is always front and center, issuing platitudes about economics, poor folks, and rightness in McConaughey’s textbook drawl. There’s even a scene where Knight leads a group of grown black men to the ballot box because they are too afraid to do so otherwise.”

Now that would be an odd decision for a director who sees white people as obstacles in the fight for black liberation, but Ross is making a different case. In the face of white terrorism against Black communities, unwavering solidarity from those who are privileged enough to turn a blind eye is a necessity. This is just as true today as it was during the Freedom Rides and indeed as it was in Knight’s time.

To be fair, Newkirk’s criticism is mostly that Knight is given an outsized role, and not that he is given any role. But even here he is missing the point. At a time when scores of white people can all too comfortably assert that “All Lives Matter,” a film profiling a white, radical, anti-racist is not about making white people feel good about themselves, but rather about actually challenging them to step up their game. Progressive audiences should continue to challenge Hollywood's still too lily-white status quo, and demand to see films about Rachel or Moses, played by Mahershala Ali, but that shouldn’t necessarily mean that films about white people in struggle and solidarity with people of color (i.e. comrades) should stop being produced.