White Magnolia’s is a short dance film that investigates white female purity and its historical ties to the Black male body in the American South. Centered around the magnolia tree—an emblem of white Southern femininity and its racialized legacy—the film exposes how the ideal of white purity has been wielded as a weapon, leading to the violence of lynching and the erasure of Black life.

The magnolia stands as both a symbol and a witness to this history—its white blooms evoking the ways white womanhood has been positioned as innocent and delicate, even as it has fueled racial terror. The film grapples with this duality, revealing how the magnolia’s beauty masks the violence woven into Southern landscapes and the bodies marked by it.