I Am Not Your Negro
A NATION STILL CATCHING UP TO JAMES BALDWIN
I Am Not Your Negro
‘History is not the past. Hist or y is t he present.” So says American writer, social critic and civil rights advocate James Baldwin in this prescient, Oscar- nominated documentary, based on an unfinished manuscript he began in 1979.
Though the book, Remember This House, remained uncompleted when Baldwin died of cancer in 1987, its story of the lives of black Americans, viewed through Baldwin’s memories of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers, remains tragically contemporary today.
When director Raoul Peck cuts between a talk given by Baldwin in the mid-1960s and the Ferguson race riots of 2014, only the quality of the footage belies the fact that 50 years separate the two events.
Baldwin was one of the less strident speakers of the time, and notes at one point that “I never really managed to hate white people,” adding mildly: “God knows I have often wished to murder more than one or two.” When audio of Baldwin is not available, Samuel L. Jackson calmly reads his words.
Born in New York City in 1924, Baldwin grew up enraptured by movies. He describes watching Joan Crawford in 1931’s Dance, Fools, Dance, and later seeing a black woman at a corner store who l ooked so beautiful, she and Crawford became the same person in his eyes, in spite of the difference in skin colour.
But he grew to learn that movies were white America’s way of talking to itself. “We made a legend out of a massacre,” he says of cowboys and Indians films. And while he started out rooting out for Gary Cooper, he came to identify with the Indians.
I Am Not Your Negro ( the title recalls the recent # NotYourMascot controversy around the Cleveland Indians baseball team) is a complicated, layered piece of storytelling. Baldwin presents himself as a witness to history rather than a participant, though he also notes: “The line that separates a witness from an actor is a very thin line indeed.”
The film does not present itself as a cry to action, and it does not pretend to offer solutions. But it cannot help but enrage those who watch it, with its depictions of how little has changed.
Bobby Kennedy may have been just about right when he said in 1961 that in 40 years there might be a negro president. But Baldwin, speaking at the same time, notes that the prediction is poorly framed.
“From the point of view of the man in Harlem barber shop,” he says, “Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday. And now he’s already on his way to the presidency. We’ve been here for 400 years and now he tells us that maybe, in 40 years, if you’re good, we may let you become President.”
He also says: “Not everything that’s faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” That is history speaking to the present. It’s up to the present to listen. ΩΩΩΩ
I Am Not Your Negro opens Feb. 24 in Toronto and Vancouver, and March 3 in Montreal, with other cities to follow.