I Am Not Your Negro

By: Amos Lassen

"I Am Not Your Negro"
Remembering James Baldwin
Amos Lassen
Haitian filmmaker Raul Peck's powerful new documentary is a memoir/semi-biography of James Baldwin, the great African/American man of letters. The screenplay is made up of prose taken directly from Baldwin's texts or letters which are read by the actor Samuel L Jackson who does so with passion and dignity. Baldwin had been asked to write a biography about the lives of three of his civil rights activists friends who had given their lives for their beliefs; Medgar Evers, Malcom X and Martin Luther King.

Baldwin left America and lived in France from a very early age so that he could escape the discrimination he faced as an openly gay black man. He claimed that the United States is a complex country that insists on being very narrow-minded. In this documentary we actually see several of Baldwin's TV appearances on visits to the US where he never held back on his own strident and somewhat controversial opinions. When Dick Cavett questioned him about American society's racism and whether how he felt about the fate of Blacks in this country, Baldwin replied that he felt hopeless not just for the Black man but for all of mankind.
What I find so amazing in this film is the way Director Peck and his editor Alexander Strauss juxtapose archival footage with Baldwin's words and video excerpts of current troubled spots like Ferguson. We see just how accurate Baldwin was and see that his fears have become a reality some thirty years after his death. What is absolutely fascinating is that even though Baldwin was so out of line with most political and social commentators at that time and with the general public, he still was respected for his outspoken opinions and views. Today with its political climate, I am not sure that would have happened. Baldwin said at the time that "racism is the source of America's emotional and moral poverty, and that apathy and ignorance are the price of segregation".

The film is a meditation on the prophetic brilliance of Baldwin who was the poet of injustice and inhumanity. He wrote down what he saw (in essays and novels and plays and poems) and he was far ahead of his time (that is now catching up). It is shocking the way Cavett used the word "Negro" while speaking to Baldwin and I think many of us think that the word no longer exists. I remember watching a documentary about the freedom riders several years ago and in a clip of a newscast with Walter Cronkite, the news anchor used the word and I found it to be totally abrasive.
James Baldwin remains a towering figure in the fields of letters and human rights and someday there will be a great documentary about him- this is not that film. Yet here we discover a great deal about Baldwin without the historical facts that biographical documentaries look at. We do not learn about his and how that came about. We see a bit about his fame and the celebrated figures he was close to and about his self-imposed exile to Europe. His sexuality is mentioned only once and in an FBI report that was instigated by the paranoid-closeted racist J. Edgar Hoover who warns that Baldwin is "dangerous" and that he's suspected of being a homosexual.

The film transports us inside James Baldwin's mind, and we become close to his existential perception of the hidden meaning of race in America. Jackson's reading of Baldwin's words is uncanny and beautiful. He holds onto the meaning of each word and these words are both proud and drenched in shame, and we sense that they reflect Baldwin's insecurity and display his honesty. Baldwin lived with the idea
that if one was black, the complexity of his humanity was not seen. He felt that rights weren't necessarily going to change that. He saw that a racist society oppresses, but that it also hollows out the souls of those who are doing the oppressing. For Baldwin, racism against black people was, fundamentally, a way that white America had come up with to play out its own psychological disfigurement. Until white America came to grips with that, our society would remain broken.
Baldwin speaks to us like a somberly eloquent ghost from the past, and he that the "American racial problem" is not the American racial problem. It's a crisis of the American spirit, with race as the excuse. The documentary focuses much of its energy on the fights for racial and economic justice during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s and it has much to say about the uneasy and troubling signs of racial hatred today.