'The Whiteness Project': Does Opening Talk About Race or is it Just Racist? (TWEETS)

White people were really underrepresented... and then there was the Whiteness Project.

Filmmaker Whitney Dow, with partial funding from PBS, dropkicked the internet with his documentary that challenged white people to become more comfortable with their racial identity and how their identity forces others to see themselves in relation to whites, the Daily Intelligencer reports.

Dow told Daily Intelligencer that he felt he had "no racial identity" while being part of "the most powerful racial identity in America." The reaction on Twitter was swift and not a positive one.

"I think that my goal is to get white people to sort of confront the disconnect between how they experience the world and the reality of the place they hold in the world," Dow told the Daily Intelligencer. "So far, I think it's done a good job of creating these conversations. I realize that when you come in as a white belt in Twitter jujitsu and you're facing black belts, you're going down hard. The people who have serious Twitter skills - I'm not able to compete."

Some people may view the documentary as racist, since. Well, the people featured do say some racist things, (Forty percent of white people think black people are violent, Dow told the Daily Intelligencer), but Dow says the documentary speaks truths and has opened up a conversation that will improve race relations.

"I think it's because our sense of whiteness is very caught up in our relationship to blackness, and vice versa," Dow said in his interview with the Daily Intelligencer. "I got a really beautiful letter from a woman that said, as a black woman watching, she always felt like her blackness was defined by whiteness, and she didn't realize how caught up in blackness white people were."

Dow said that white people tend to think of themselves as "ethinic" (Italian, Irish, English), but they see race as "something outside themselves." He thinks that may be a point of miscommunication between races.

"The other thing that I would say is I can't tell you how grateful I am to these people who are willing to speak honestly to me," Dow said later in the interview. "Cut them some slack if you don't like what they're saying, because white people don't have a lot of experience talking about whiteness. They are not always going to sound how you want them to sound."

What do you think?

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Race