The story of Arlo Washington is just about as inspirational as it gets. Orphaned in his early teens, Arlo from Little Rock, Arkansas, went to barber college and opened up his own barber shop before he had even reached 20. He soon founded the Washington Barber College which created jobs within the community, raised hope and helped to alleviate poverty.
But Washington had an even greater calling. He lived in an economically segregated society where the opportunities offered to White folk were simply not available to African Americans. It was a society in which racism is/was endemic, as underlined by Highway 630, “the great divide” which separates communities in the city. On one side of Highway 630 live 30,000 mainly Black residents without an ATM in sight. On the other side is the Heights, with a largely White population of 8000 and 14 flourishing banks.
As Arlo puts it in the film, “capital is the life blood of the community. If blood ain’t circulating, you’re going to have some issues.” In the US, we are told in the film, the average White household has 8 times the wealth of the average Black household.
He could see that local people didn’t need a fortune to get by, but they still needed support, and so he founded, in 2016, the People’s Trust non-profit loan fund to give people a much-needed financial leg-up. Then in 2022 he founded the People Trust Community Federal Credit Union, the first Black-owned bank in Arkansas designed to prioritize underserved communities.
And all the time the Washington Barber College continued its work, training up more than 1500 new professionals since 2008.
When researching the film, co-directors John Hoffman and Christine Turner were inspired by Mehrsa Baradaran’s book The Color of Money, which looks at how, historically, the Black community has been systematically shut out of the banking system in the US.
“In that book we read about CDFIs, community development financial institutions,” says Turner. “And the CDFI Fund is one of the very few existing policies that has helped to narrow the racial wealth gap…Then we happened upon a Zoom conversation between former president Bill Clinton and a woman named Donna J Gambrell, who was the first director of the CBFI Fund, which was established under the Clinton administration.”
The filmmakers reached out to Gambrell, explaining that they wanted to embed into one of these CDFIs to make their observational doc.
“She said, there’s this guy who’s a former barber. He runs a barber college in his parking lot. He’s opened up a CDFI in a converted shipping container. And so that’s how we learned about Arlo.”
“Aside from him being this charismatic, passionate person about his work, it was very clear that he was doing something in the community that was completely unique. And we felt that Little Rock as a city was an interesting place to situate the film as well. It has an interesting, important place in civil rights history,” Turner adds.
In the film a series of local interlocutors are also asked to answer questions on the business of race and racism. Their responses are blunt. On the almost alien concept of ownership, one respondent answers, “nothing was passed down to me, and I got nothing to pass down to them.” On the everyday reality of racism: “Banking while black, driving while black, eating while black, your waiter or your waitress would treat you differently. I mean, there’s just so many things.” On the American Dream, a male respondent answers simply, “I wouldn’t know.”
The film went up onto the New Yorker website on January 10, which the filmmakers believe will help place the spotlight on the chronic social injustices they expose, as well as the solutions proposed and acted on by the likes of Arlo.
“In its festival life, it’s been very moving to be in audiences and to have the chance to answer questions and have people stand up and speak with great emotion about how the film has affected them. More than once, older white men have stood up and said essentially this exact same thing. [They said] ‘it wasn’t until now, it wasn’t until watching this film that I understood what this phrase the racial wealth gap was,’” says Hoffman.
Adds Turner: “Being on the Oscar shortlist is being part of a course that could have unbelievable impact on the film. Should we get nominated – put aside the idea of winning the Oscar – but if we get nominated, it just elevates an awareness for the film that no other amount of marketing and PR could achieve. The Oscars hold such a place in the world if we are so fortunate as to get there.”
Turner further expresses her surprise and gratitude at the generosity of the film’s participants. “The amount that they gave and shared with us about their personal lives, their finances, the way that money impacts their life. It’s a very personal matter. And much of that is really due to the Arlo Washington relationship. He really created an environment where people felt a sense of trust in him, and in his wife also who runs the barber college with him. And so, by virtue, that trust was extended to us.”
“He really is almost a mentor figure to some and a brother to others. And he fulfils many different roles aside from running the loan fund and the barber college. And there were some really powerful moments that occurred, when filming, that we were not expecting,” she adds.
Among scenes of folk rendered tearful by their elevation out of poverty through Arlo’s intervention, or as he arranges loans to set new businesses on course, there is a striking two-minute eyeball to eyeball face-off between two hefty guys in the barber college, a confrontation not designed to psyche out or physically intimidate (á la a heavyweight bout), rather to look into the soul of the other and discover places of, and reasons for, empathy. It is a highly emotional experience with considerable resonance for the participants and the group as a whole.
“It was stunning,” says Hoffman. “And I think that those kinds of experiences, that group of people and everybody who was involved in running the barber college, they all witnessed it, and I think it changed their relationship to the film, because we were, in that moment, together.”
