WATCH: From Trees to White Women, Everything Is Racist in These PBS Documentaries
17th April 2025
PBS receives roughly 15 percent of its $373 million operating budget from the federal government. In addition to its member stations and on-demand streaming shows, some of the money goes to Independent Lens, the weekly series through which PBS airs documentary films. They often have to do with racism.
The 2022 Independent Lens flick Racist Trees, for example, chronicles a black neighborhood in the overwhelmingly liberal “LGBTQ haven” of Palm Springs, Calif. The neighborhood’s residents feel that a “wall of trees” that lines a nearby golf course was “intentionally planted to exclude and segregate” the neighborhood, and want the trees removed.
“They say that these trees are not racially motivated, that they were not racially planted there,” one interviewee says in the film. “They can prove that by one simple act. Remove the trees.”