The Sin of Shape-Shifting Supremacists

IN 2016, RAOUL PECK'S documentary I Am Not Your Negro used the life and work of James Baldwin to explore the underlying truths of racism in U.S. society. Peck said that after making that film, “Baldwin had firebombed every known field of bigotry I knew and annihilated any attempt at deniability of the racist monster that lurks in corners of our societies.”

Processing that experience led Peck to his new, ambitious HBO documentary series Exterminate All the Brutes. In it, Peck expands on the themes of ignorance and resistance in our modern-day understanding of racism and on how our flawed historical understanding feeds those attitudes. Exterminate All the Brutes is also an essay film, with Peck, a Haitian immigrant, reflecting on his identity as a Black man who has lived in a variety of cultures and how that’s influenced his own art.

The series weaves voiceover and scripted dramatic scenes with information from groundbreaking works on European colonialism, Indigenous peoples, and racism—including Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past, and Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes.

As with I Am Not Your Negro, Peck is interested in how the past informs our present. The results are heartbreaking and eye-opening. In a 2008 speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, then-Sen. Barack Obama pointed to slavery as America’s original sin. Peck goes further, noting that colonization and the systematic dehumanization of native peoples are what allowed slavery to happen in the first place.

This sentiment echoes throughout Exterminate All the Brutes’ episodes. The scripted scenes feature, for example, Josh Hartnett playing a white oppressor in a variety of guises. In one, he’s a U.S. Army sergeant who massacres a Seminole tribe. In another, a colonizer in then Belgian Congo who kills and mutilates Congolese rubber farmers. Peck positions Hartnett’s shape-shifting everyman as the forebear of the white supremacists who terrorized Charlottesville in 2017. It’s a useful reminder that no matter what mask it wears, the sin of white supremacy is the same, and its roots run deep.

With Exterminate All the Brutes, Peck crams 600 years of history into four hours of television, and in the process makes many of us question everything we’ve ever learned. These ideas aren’t new—Peck acknowledges the work of those who’ve come before—but the series is a ruthlessly efficient expression of them. It’s also a valuable unpacking of how history informs modern identity, directly and indirectly. It’s not an easy watch, but it is a necessary one, peeling away every excuse and whitewashed historical tale to lay bare uncomfortable truths at the core of Western civilization.