Baldwin’s ‘I Am Not Your Negro’ is work of brilliance

say in one sitting is like trying to catch Niagara in a teacup.

But what is most stunning about “Negro” is its prescience and, more to the point, what its prescience says about what America still is. Here are the words of a man who died in 1987 and yet, those words somehow contain Trayvon Martin, the Ferguson uprising, the election of Donald Trump and all the other broken promises.

“People finally say to you,” says Baldwin through Jackson, “in an attempt to dismiss the social reality: ‘But you’re so bitter.’ Well, I may or may not be bitter. But if I were, I would have good reasons for it, chief among them that American blindness or cowardice which allows us to pretend that life presents no reasons for being bitter.” As he speaks, you are watching a kneeling Rodney King get kicked in the back of the head by an L.A. cop.

And you might, if you are African-American, want to shout hallelujah at hearing those who blithely chastise your “anger” thus elegantly rebuked.

“There are days,” says Baldwin, “... when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it. How, precisely, are you going to reconcile yourself to your situation here and how you are going to communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here?”

And you might, if you are African-American, want to bow your head and lift a hand to the ceiling, because you have wondered, too, but did not have the words to say.

“When the Israelis pick up guns,” says Baldwin, “or the Poles or the Irish or any white man in the world says ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad (expletive) so there won’t be any more like him.” And you might, if you are African-American, just want to pat your feet and say Amen. Even now. “The scariest thing,” says Peck, “is that it is so precise and dead on the point of what is happening right now . ... We have been somehow in a sort of lethargy. ” If so, then “Negro” is a disinterment. More than a work of unparalleled brilliance, it is an urgent reminder that when it comes to race and America, the truth is not “safe.” And it never was. SANTA MONICA, CALIF. — The Cold War was waged and won in many places, including this beach city, home to the RAND Corp. Created in 1948 to think about research and development as it effects military planning and procurement, RAND pioneered strategic thinking about nuclear weapons in the context of the U.S.-Soviet competition. Seven decades later it is thinking about the nuclear threat from a nation created in 1948.

When Defense Secretary James Mattis said that any North Korean use of nuclear weapons would draw an “effective and overwhelming” U.S. response, he did not, according to RAND’s Bruce