Ahmaud Arbery murdered by White Supremacists while jogging in Satilla Shores, Georgia on February 23, 2020. Not until the video surfaced and went viral were the perpetrators arrested.

THE horrible hate crime against Ahmaud Arbery, like all the cases of citizen and police brutality against people of color captured on video in recent years, has provoked me to think about my long, uncomfortable, painful, shocking and shameful journey to absorb the lessons of racism in the U.S. As a white woman, an immigrant (from Canada with its own history of racial annihilation and discrimination, a granddaughter of white settlers on the Canadian Prairie), who eventually migrated to the heart of media work in New York City.

Back in the early 90s, during years when I was working as a producer, director and writer for Bill Moyers at PBS, I was working on a documentary about families in crisis — usually single moms — who had lost their children to foster homes for one reason or another: poverty, substance abuse, domestic violence, or some painful combination of all three. A new approach to social work was reigniting these families, reuniting them. Helping them to stick together. To document this required doing research with a variety of families in St Louis, Missouri; Louisville, Kentucky and Detroit, Michigan. I had hired Damon as my associate producer. Damon was African American from Trenton, New Jersey. He had experience as a cameraman/producer for a local TV station. I wanted a mature person with me who could respect our subjects, be open to reconsidering assumptions, offer insights I may overlook and be experienced working with crews on the road.

In our process of interviewing families and social workers, one research trip took us to a small town just south of St Louis, along the Mississippi River. It meant staying in a motel overnight along the river. After our dinner, I suggested to Damon that we go for a run along the river in the morning before breakfast and our workday. He looked at me with disbelief. “Are you kidding? No way, thank you. Here, on the Mississippi? me running with a white woman? You must be crazy! I want to live.”

Deep lesson, No, 1. on that project. I was aghast. I thought I had been around. Had black boyfriends on the West Coast, one who worked with CORE. Had given lip service to Civil Rights and then Black Power in the 60s. Hung out in one of the first integrated clubs in Berkeley in the 60s. Had visited a Black friend in San Quentin, in the days when Black Panthers were being educated in the prisons. In fact I had met a young white professor at a Black Panther fundraiser in Oakland in 1968, and followed him to Washington University in St Louis. There I had campaigned for Shirley Chisholm in the early 70s and scraped lead paint off the walls of single moms — often black — living in substandard apartments. In Boston, I had lived in what was considered the Black Ghetto. Then I lived in New York City, where the Brooklyn Museum had sent me off to Haiti to produce a dozen short documentaries. I had read some James Baldwin. Toni Morrison. I thought I knew something about the Black Experience. Could it be that I knew nothing? That my skin privilege meant I wasn’t paying attention? I wasn’t listening carefully to hip-hop? This was 1991. Yes, I knew something about police brutality (I thought), the Rodney King beating had just shocked and mesmerized a nation, but jogging by the river?

Lesson Two occurred when we went to Louisville, Kentucky to research families and locales to shoot. We were visiting a nearby tobacco farm where one of our white mothers had grown up. We were being led around the farm and the shed where tobacco was dried, by her sister. All of a sudden, she took me aside, whispering while pointing at Damon. “Keep him close to you here. If he wanders off he’ll be shot.” I’m not sure that I heard anything more that day from anyone’s mouths. I was too shaken to even tell Damon. We would eventually film a short scene at that tobacco farm and I made sure that Damon never left my side.

In Detroit while shooting with a black family and black social workers, we were witnessing a level of poverty that left us deeply troubled, but Damon’s personal safety was not an issue. A contrast with scenes we were shooting in Louisville and then in South St Louis, where we were telling the story of a white woman, ex-prostitute, who had become addicted and abused, but now had her children back and was working hard to keep them. One day while shooting at her house, I went to a local park with her 7 year-old who wanted to show off his golf swings. Damon was staying behind with some of the crew at Connie’s house. As I left with the cameraman, he said to me, “I will be sitting on her front steps the ENTIRE TIME, where I am visibly NOT in her house ALONE with her.”

We producers of documentaries learn so much in the process of researching and telling the stories of others. But the lessons I learned working with Damon on this documentary have stuck with me for the past two and a half decades. No running while black, no feeling free to walk while black, no entering a house with a white woman who is only an acquaintance — even if you are there professionally.

I worked with other African American colleagues over the years with other humbling lessons, but what I learned that year with Damon were lessons I wish I had never had to learn. Or that I could forget because our evil White Supremacist history, deeply rooted in the founding of our country, has come to an end and justice, equality, fairness, generosity and empathy prevail.