It’s no reflection on Chico Colvard that he’s better at raising the issue of racist memorabilia than at resolving it.

A new documentary, Black Memorabilia, airs Monday at 10 p.m. ET in the PBS Independent Lens series (check local listings). Colvard is the producer and director, and when he wrestles indeterminately with his subject, it puts him in company with pretty much the rest of the world.

It’s not that Colvard lacks a point of view. He explains that he grew up with all-too-familiar racial imagery, from TV cartoons to the food packaging in his kitchen cabinets, and that “these exaggerated and demeaning representations of African-Americans were alien to the hard-working and dignified people I knew.”

No reasonable person today would argue with that. The question is what to do with the ocean of physical objects that were produced in the many years when mainstream marketers saw nothing offensive about selling products with images of, say, a black child with bulging eyes and a wide grin eating a slice of watermelon.

Colvard takes a multi-pronged approached, breaking his hour-long film into three sections.

The first follows Jian, a Chinese factory worker who painstakingly paints old-time black faces on iron containers that are sold as replicas (or sometimes passed off as originals) of actual containers that were sold decades ago.

Jian, who Colvard says is a composite of a real-life and dramatized character, talks about her work, which is not easy or lucrative. She takes pride in it, purely as craft, and sometimes looks on eBay to see how much those containers are bringing. She wonders if some of them might be hers.

She also acknowledges that she feels ambivalence because she understands the nature of the images. Colvard follows her through to some decisions on this dilemma.

The second segment follows Joy, a white memorabilia dealer who specializes in what some might consider the underside of Americana.

She sells unflattering images of African Americans, on paper and on various objects, mostly knick-knacks.

She sells material like certificates of slave sales. And Confederate flags. And Ku Klux Klan items. Alongside other historical documents and items that have nothing to do with race.

She says she sells them because people want them – black memorabilia is hot these days, she explains – and in the hopes that everyone will eventually come to agree that we have moved past their original racist implications.

If that sounds naïve, in many ways it’s the heart of the issue. These things exist. They are part of American history and the history of other countries. We can’t erase them, and if we could, should we?

If we don’t remember and acknowledge the nature and depth of a problem, can we correct it?

Since Colvard only has an hour, he has to let a full examination of that complex question linger in the air. His only direct response is deliberately narrow and specific, with a third segment that focuses on an African-American artist in Brooklyn.

That artist, Alexandria, dresses models and creates performance productions using familiar trappings from racist caricatures. In so doing, she says, she reclaims ownership of those images and strips them of their racist power.

That’s not a new approach. Numerous artists, prominently including some rappers, have explained their use of the N-word as reclaiming it, making it a fraternal term inside the family rather than a dismissive term from an outsider.

Perhaps in the long term, reclamation will prove a feasible strategy. We’re not there yet, as Black Memorabilia illustrates.  

Colvard makes a convincing case, partly through several sobering montages of racially incendiary images, that too much of America for too many years systematically portrayed black folks as narcissistic, dangerous, animalistic, utilitarian or foolishly simple.

The troubling side of black memorabilia – as opposed to the uplifting side, the side that recalls achievements, art, and dignity – leaves us with a physical as well as a psychological legacy of the dishonorable past.

If we get to a point where we can say that’s the way we were and the way we won’t be again, we will have settled the question Colvard addresses. At the moment, he reminds us we aren’t there yet.