essay on i am not your negro

The Imperfect Power of I Am Not Your Negro

Raoul Peck’s documentary brings to life James Baldwin’s urgent ideas about race in America, even if it leaves out a key aspect of the writer’s life and work: his sexuality.

A novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet, James Baldwin was a writer with an arsenal of artistic talent and moral imagination. His signature style was his prose—startling in its intricate design and depth of perception, and fierce in its determination to dismantle the racial assumptions of the American republic and the English language. Baldwin lent his words and energies also to the civil-rights movement and would write one of the defining books of that era, The Fire Next Time , his 1963 classic .

While Baldwin fell out of critical favor in the last decade of his life, and in the years that followed his death in 1987, his work always remained a source of deep and demanding insight and beauty—which is why it’s so heartening to witness the national revival he is currently enjoying. This past September, at the dedication ceremony of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, President Barack Obama began his remarks by quoting from Baldwin’s short story, “Sonny’s Blues.” A group of arts and educational institutions in New York City declared 2014 “The Year of James Baldwin.” And, over the past decade, he has received an unprecedented level of scholarly attention, including the founding of an annual journal committed to reappraising and preserving his legacy.

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Now add to this list the director Raoul Peck’s powerful but imperfect documentary I Am Not Your Negro, which received critical acclaim and a Best Documentary Oscar nomination before it opened nationwide on February 3. The film draws its inspiration from Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, Remember This House , intended to be a personal recollection of his friends, the civil-rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—all of whom were assassinated within five years of each other. About a decade after King’s death, in a letter dated June 30, 1979, Baldwin told his literary agent that he had started sketching out a new book in which he wanted the lives of these extraordinary men “to bang against and reveal one another as they did in life.” Baldwin made little progress on the project, however, and left behind only 30 pages by the time he died in 1987.

I Am Not Your Negro ’s narrative voice comes from this unfinished manuscript, in addition to Baldwin’s published works and various television appearances. Unlike conventional documentaries that cede narrative control to family members, friends, and experts to shed light on the film’s subject, Peck’s film relies almost exclusively on Baldwin’s writings, read by Samuel L. Jackson. This ingenious move allows viewers to fully appreciate Baldwin’s unmatched eloquence and form a portrait of the artist through his own words, even if the film largely (and somewhat inexplicably) omits a crucial aspect of his work and life: his sexuality.

I Am Not Your Negro begins with the author’s return to the U.S. in 1957 after living in France for almost a decade—a return prompted by seeing a photograph of 15-year-old Dorothy Counts and the violent white mob that surrounded her as she entered and desegregated Harding High School in Charlotte, North Carolina. After seeing that picture, Baldwin explained, “I could simply no longer sit around Paris discussing the Algerian and the black American problem. Everybody was paying their dues, and it was time I went home and paid mine.” I Am Not Your Negro chronicles Baldwin’s life through the civil-rights movement, focusing on his personal relationships to Medgar, Malcolm, and Martin.

Repeatedly, the documentary demonstrates Baldwin’s unique ability to expose the ways anti-black sentiment constituted not only American social and political life but also its cultural imagination. Baldwin was an avid moviegoer and wrote about a number of films in his 1976 book, The Devil Finds Work , writings that are brought to life in the documentary. I Am Not Your Negro uses choice scenes from various films— Dance, Fools, Dance (1931), Imitation of Life (1934), Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), among others—to show how Hollywood traffics in stereotypes of black menace and subservience as foils for white purity and innocence. In a reflexive move, then, Peck’s film also becomes a commentary on a U.S. movie industry that was bent on reifying racial stereotypes and on perpetuating a fiction of America as the greatest purveyor of freedom, democracy, and happiness.

However much a documentary about American life in the 1960s, I Am Not Your Negro also uses Baldwin’s insights to illuminate our own contemporary reality. The movie’s most gripping scenes intercut footage of police violence directed against black people in the ’60s and shots of similar violence enacted today, using Baldwin’s words to collapse the distance between the two eras. The juxtaposition bracingly highlights the uncanny similarity between the series of black deaths that punctuated Baldwin’s life during the civil-rights era, and the series of deaths—of Aiyana Jones, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, and so many others—that mark our own calendar.

Yet for all its recognition that the circumstances of Baldwin’s time echo in the events of today, I Am Not Your Negro remains oddly silent on the role of sexuality in Baldwin’s work and life. Baldwin was one of the first American writers to write openly about queer sexuality. As early as 1949, Baldwin had broached the subject in his essay “The Preservation of Innocence,” and had made it a central theme in his fiction, beginning with his second novel, the 1956 masterpiece Giovanni’s Room . In fact, in 1979, when he began to sketch Remember This House , he had just published his last and arguably finest novel, Just Above My Head , the story of an internationally acclaimed black gay gospel singer.

I Am Not Your Negro presents no sense of this essential thread in Baldwin’s work. Only a passing instance gestures to his sexuality in the film, which reproduces a short sentence from an FBI memo that identifies Baldwin as a suspected homosexual. That the film uses the FBI to account for a major element of Baldwin’s life and corpus, instead of the author’s own voice, further compounds the silence. The apparent desire to represent Baldwin as the quintessential Race Man—a public spokesman and leader of African Americans with ostensibly straight bona fides—goes against not only the principles of Baldwin’s work, but also the reality of his fraught position in the civil-rights movement as a queer black man.

During the ’60s, liberals and radicals alike mocked and attacked Baldwin because of his sexuality. President John F. Kennedy, and many others, referred to him disparagingly as “ Martin Luther Queen ”; and Eldridge Cleaver, one of the leaders of the Black Panther Party, wrote in his memoir Soul on Ice : “The case of James Baldwin aside for a moment, it seems that many Negro homosexuals, acquiescing in this racial death-wish, are outraged and frustrated because in their sickness they are unable to have a baby by a white man.” In Baldwin’s No Name in the Street (1971), a source from which I Am Not Your Negro draws heavily, the author responded to Cleaver’s attacks against him, but viewers wouldn’t know from the film’s narrative slant how the experience of race and sexuality were closely intertwined for Baldwin.

That Peck chose not to complicate its audience’s view of Baldwin, especially the time in Baldwin’s life when his sexuality became a liability to his public role, is a missed opportunity. And it forgoes the chance to have Baldwin’s complex life reflect the complexity of our contemporary identities—including how race and sexuality inform our lives not as discrete experiences but as mutually reinforcing ones. To be sure, as he was of America’s racial categories, Baldwin was suspicious of categories like “homosexual” or “gay” to sum up the range of human desire. Still, as he points out in one of his last essays, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” from 1985: “The idea of one’s sexuality can only with great violence be divorced or distanced from the idea of the self.”

In spite of this startling omission, I Am Not Your Negro delivers a remarkable portrait of Baldwin’s life and more broadly of America’s ongoing racial dilemma. It’s a fitting effect for a film about a writer who displayed a rare vulnerability in his work, laying bare his own personal experience as text for national self-reflection. At a minimum, I Am Not Your Negro introduces viewers who may not have read Baldwin to the genius of one of America’s greatest writers. How deeply his words resonate today is a mark of his prophetic vision, which, as the film argues, this nation fails to heed at its continued peril.

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James Baldwin articulates how the subjugation and oppression of Black people requires the moral apathy and cognitive dissonance of white Americans. In I Am Not Your Negro , the film juxtaposes archival and current footage, subverts interpretations through audio, and features a narration with repetitive themes of immorality and white insecurity to illustrate the identity conflict of white Americans that is necessary to dehumanize their fellow brothers and sisters. The film switches between footage of protests of the civil rights era and today to narrate the struggle against police brutality, meanwhile overlaying romanticized audio to convey the ignorance of white Americans. Samuel L. Jackson’s narration of Baldwin solidifies the identity conflict of white people in its critique of past films, and also the alienation of Baldwin as he navigates being a “witness or actor.”

I Am Not Your Negro parallels the protests of police brutality today to those of the 1960s. The texturization of current footage, such as the Ferguson protests and Obama’s election, help the clips smoothly transition in between archived footage. The film implements the Kuleshov effect to contextualize earlier videos, such as the back to back shots of Mars and the protests of Birmingham, which convey how white people saw the unrest as extraordinary. The combination of Baldwin’s insistence of moral awakening with footage of the KKK and Black Lives Matter protests challenges the audience to reflect on their virtues and question why white people have created a need for the “negro.” The documentary expertly critiques early interracial films to uncover the insecurities of white people and support Baldwin’s claim that movies were designed to reassure white people of their morality. The film further emphasizes the identity conflict and cognitive dissonance of white people through superimposing images of Black death and white happiness, with a romanticized music score.

The unusual auditory and visual combination of Black suffering and white happiness is done through cross dissolving images of white women laughing with images of lynchings. The romanticized music on top of graphic imagery, such as the beating of Rodney King, subverts audience interpretations and forces them to watch through the lens of ignorant “moral monsters.” Music is also used as evidence of racism and resistance in entertainment. On one hand, comical music exaggerates the absurdity of “mammie” advertisements and on the other, heightens the emotions of protests through sounds of gunshots and violence.

Baldwin’s speeches of moral apathy, white insecurity, and Black alienation speak to the identity conflict of both himself and the larger white population. There is a repetitive theme of Black death and white insecurity, which the film drives home through interviews of Baldwin redefining the “Negro problem” as an “American problem,” and questioning why white people even created the “Negro problem” in the first place. Baldwin insists that if “Americans were not so terrified of their private selves” they wouldn’t have created the “Negro problem.” The identity conflict that allows white people to kill their Black brothers and sisters is derived from an internal struggle, which the film illustrates through contrasting archived and current footage, subversive audio, and themes of immorality and insecurity.

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I Am Not Your Negro

34 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Front Matter

Part 1: “Paying My Dues”

Part 2: “Heroes”

Part 3: “Witness”

Part 4: “Purity”

Part 5: “Selling the Negro”

Part 6: “I Am Not A N*****”

Key Figures

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Summary and Study Guide

I Am Not Your Negro by James Baldwin and Raoul Peck is an accompanying text to the 2016 documentary of the same name, directed by Peck. The documentary was released to critical acclaim. It won Best Documentary award at the BAFTA Film Awards and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The text is essentially a transcript of the film, incorporating excerpts of interviews, television features, and films.

I Am Not Your Negro is based on an unfinished book by Baldwin titled Remember This House in which he intended to explore American racism by focusing on the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. , Medgar Evers , and Malcolm X—three leaders in the American civil rights movement who Baldwin knew and loved. Baldwin never finished his manuscript, only leaving behind thirty pages of notes. Peck approached the project by attempting to construct a finished draft of Remember This House based on Baldwin’s notes and letters. The resulting text makes up I Am Not Your Negro.

This guide quotes and obscures Baldwin’s use of the n-word, the construction of which is one topic within his critique of racism in America.

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I Am Not Your Negro ’s Raoul Peck on Optimism Versus Pessimism, the Class Struggle, and Why James Baldwin Still Resonates Today

This winter has brought a selection of great films that powerfully and painfully reflect the black experience in  Barry Jenkins’s  Moonlight , a tender and aching coming-of-age story that portrays blackness, queerness, and masculinity in a way rarely seen on the screen, and  Ava DuVernay’s 13th , a heartbreaking documentary that sheds light on mass incarceration as a form of modern-day slavery. February 3 sees the release of another crucial film, Raoul Peck’s Oscar-nominated I Am Not Your Negro . The documentary, ten years in the making, creates visual poetry out of James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript Remember This House , a text that rings eerily true almost 40 years later.

The Haitian-born Peck eschews documentary conventions: There are no talking heads, only Baldwin, in archival footage and excerpts from the manuscript voiced by Samuel L. Jackson. The actor carries the heavy weight of Baldwin’s words — sometimes fiery, often weary — as he examines the civil-rights movement, the intersection of race and class, and the lives and deaths of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Medgar Evers. In our current political climate, it’s a film that demands to be seen. Just a month before the Oscars and a week before the inauguration, I sat down with Raoul Peck to discuss what Baldwin means to him, the importance of the class struggle in the fight for racial justice, and why he put Kendrick Lamar over the end credits.

There’s so much to unpack with James Baldwin’s words, I need to see this film again. It’s a very rich film with many layers. When you see it again, you almost see a different film. It’s a really personal experience.

Did you find it complicated to take the text and make it into a film because of all those layers? At first, it was the impossible project. I knew what I felt and why it was strong. I asked, How do I make the film? I had to go as far as I could artistically — not only in terms of content, but also form. I had to make sure that I push the limits. And I had access to everything, which is unprecedented. I knew I better make something that’s really original and different. It’s like composing a symphony with many layers. My job was to make sure it was musical.

So you brought in Samuel L. Jackson. I actually didn’t realize he was narrating until the end credits. Some critics say it’s his best film. [ Laughs .]

He’s so understated here. He is a great actor, somebody that can take a text and create a character. I said, “I don’t want a narrator. What I need is a character. So you are the voice, you are the words. And every word has to be truthful and emotionally felt.” He’s not just reading a sentence; he’s feeling a sentence. Even the silences are full of tension.

Do you know how much James Baldwin’s work meant to him beforehand? He probably read Baldwin. The text is so powerful, and that’s why you feel like you want to listen to it again. It’s a very strong philosophical, poetic, political text. You can quote all Baldwin all day.

Baldwin doesn’t really give you an easy black or white answer. You face the reality, whether it’s hopeful or hopeless. What’s your alternative? To lie down and die? Sometimes people ask me, are you an optimist or a pessimist? It doesn’t matter. Whether I have a future or not is for me to decide. Do you intend to do something or not? But now you can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. That’s what the film does to you. After seeing the film, you can’t say, “Oh, I didn’t know, is it that bad?”

That rings especially true under Trump’s presidency. What do you hope your viewers will take away from this film? I feel like I did my duty, now it’s on the table. I think every citizen of this country should watch the film, or read Baldwin and get a grip on his life. I give you the tools for that. But I can’t do the job for you. I refuse to make films where the audience comes for consumption. I make films where you know you are also part of the process. You bring something, and you will get at least as much from the film. If there is one thing, I would say I hope Baldwin will be taught in school and that people will pay attention to his work.

This film took ten years to make. Did you feel it become increasingly more relevant, and did that put pressure to release it sooner? My impulse to make this film was already provoked by what I saw happening in this country and around the world. The civil-rights movement had done its part — we have laws and institutions, and we even have Black History Month — but does it really change the state of the people mentally? Does it change the fact that black families are more subject to abuse, to be killed, to lose their jobs? Does that change the distribution between the rich and the poor in this country? No. So I knew that the film was necessary, that Baldwin was necessary, and the book he wanted to write was exactly about that: the connection between Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., and how they were getting closer together. They were killed because they were starting to address the class situation. They understood the race situation is just one level of the same disease, which is the class separation — the rich becoming richer and the poor poorer. When you read or listen to the last speeches of Martin Luther King, they had a totally different tone. He was talking about changing this country from the ground up. The next big march to Washington was a march against poverty. That’s when the system got scared, and they made sure that he would pay the price.

Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter became a movement while you were making the film. Exactly. I didn’t know that I would use Ferguson, but when you feel that there is a historical movement — and Ferguson was historical — I knew I needed that. The only difference is we started filming these killings and seeing them in the media and social media. Cops didn’t start killing black people just five years ago. This is an ongoing situation. They have killed the whole leadership of the Black Panthers. It’s nothing new. So when you want to make a film, you better be sure that it’s still gonna be important when you finish it.

Hollywood has had diversity issues, and this past year feels monumental, almost reactionary to last year’s #OscarsSoWhite controversy. Do you feel skeptical of all this diversity praise? Last year, people reacted to the fact that there were no black or minority films in the Academy. This year it’s the contrary, but that cannot hide the fact that it’s a fundamental problem, which is that minorities are not in the position to green-light such films. We still depend on the generosity of a middle-aged white guy who barely knows anything about the rest of the world to makes these decisions. You know, you have to discuss for half an hour who Baldwin is and why he is important. As long as this is the situation, nothing will change. It’s a structural problem.

How do you think minority filmmakers should keep pushing the conversation? Well, the ones that are already in the system have no choice but to keep fighting and making films so that others can also come up onboard. It’s everyone’s responsibility, particularly those with power. Like Baldwin says, white is a metaphor for power. We just decided this color is power, but it doesn’t mean it has to be like this forever. So we have to challenge this power, this notion of whiteness, and change it.

I noticed you used Kendrick Lamar in the end credits, as does Moonlight . Why that choice? I think that he is one of the most interesting voices right now. I have been skeptical, sometimes, about the importance of rap music, which I think is a capitalistic project to make money. Kendrick is a very particular poet, and what he says makes a lot of sense to me. He is strong; he has a very wise way of seeing the world around him. And I like his music, and I thought it was a perfect circle of this present generation, the voice that is following Baldwin, and a certain tradition of resistance and art and speaking up. And I was looking for a similar voice from today and wanted to address the younger generation [and tell them] it’s also your fight, you have to be a part of this. So the choice was evident for me.

This interview has been edited and condensed. 

• i am not your negro

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'I Am Not Your Negro,' James Baldwin & Black Lives Matter: A conversation with Raoul Peck

The director Raoul Peck learned at a very young age the importance of understanding cultures different from his own. Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1953, he left when he was 8 years old for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where his father worked for the United Nations. Mr. Peck describes the cultural shock he experienced when he arrived in Kinshasa and “discovered a totally new world,” one unlike the Africa he had seen portrayed in Hollywood movies. It was this experience that would lead him to understand the importance of deconstructing the world he knew, which would deepen in his teenage years as he discovered the writing of James Baldwin and became involved in politics.

This dismantling has played a significant role in his work, evident in films like “Lumumba” and “Sometimes in April,” which depict the life of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba and the Rwandan genocide, respectively. “I Am Not Your Negro,” out in theaters this Friday, is no exception. Mr. Peck centers this story around James Baldwin’s Remember This House , the author’s unfinished manuscript on his relationship with Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Nominated for best documentary at this year’s Oscars, the film creates a parallel between the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the Black Lives Matter movement. This week, the director screened the film for students at Harlem Renaissance High School in New York. (The school, which Baldwin attended, was formerly known as P.S. 24.) Peck also provided a curriculum to help students discuss the author and his works, emphasizing his belief that reading Baldwin “should be an obligatory part of one’s education.”

I met with Mr. Peck at Magnolia Pictures to discuss his work, Baldwin and “I Am Not Your Negro.” This interview has been edited for clarity.

Olga Segura: I think as Americans, we often forget that immigration exists outside of the 50 states. What was that experience like for you?

Raoul Peck: Well, first of all it was a cultural shock…. When I was in Haiti, I left, I was 8, but my knowledge of Africa was basically through Hollywood films depicting the jungle, safari-type of stories. When I arrived in the Congo, I really thought that I would be welcomed by a bunch of savages and dancing around the airplane… And that was kind of a shock for me, a great shock, because I was discovering a lot of riches, something that I did not know existed. But I also became suspect of stories, of movies, of Hollywood because I felt that in fact it was a lie. I think all my life, that’s what made me close to Baldwin, that I always had to deconstruct whatever I was fed with.

And then when you have the chance to be somewhere else than your own country, I think you look back to your own country differently. You look back at other places differently. It’s like you’re adding another layer to your analysis. It’s like you add an additional perspective…. [Baldwin] had to leave his country very early on, when he was in his early 20s. And that made the difference. He had a better view and a better analysis of the United States by being elsewhere, by looking back to his world from Paris or from Turkey.

Segura: You talked a little bit about arriving in Africa and how you started to feel suspicious about Hollywood films. And then you studied film in West Berlin. So was this need to offer a different perspective that you weren’t finding in movies or shows that you were watching part of what inspired you to get into film?

Peck: Um, not really. My story with film is kind of different because I started with photography because my father was a photo buff. He had all sort of cameras, and I grew up with that. I have so many photos when I was 2 or 3. I remember touching those cameras and so it was something that was always in the house, wherever we were.

So film for me was something you do as a hobby. It was never a profession. Coming from a poor country like Haiti where you had to make a living, being an artist was a luxury or it was something you did because you messed up your life…. [The desire to create films] came much later. And I, by the way, studied something totally different. I studied economics. I studied industrial engineering. It wasn’t until later, when I was around 26, that I really decided to go to film school. But before I always thought, I would do film. I would make films on the side, work in my profession, make a living and provide for a family. But quite frankly, I discovered very early on that it was not possible.

Also, because I was involved in politics, my time in Berlin was an extraordinary time. I went there when I was 17, 18. Berlin at the time...had refugees from many countries… So all these people, you know, we were working together… It was really a time of international solidarity. You learn a lot through that, and politics becomes an integral part of who you are and what you do. You felt responsible for the whole world. And it was never about yourself.

I read Baldwin around this time, and he never left me. I use his writing in many occasions, both professionally and personally. He helped me understand the world. He helped me find my own place in the world.

I read Baldwin around this time, and he never left me.

Segura: So talk to me about the process behind “I Am Not Your Negro.” How long was it, from inception until completing the film?

Peck: The idea of tackling Baldwin in film came around 10 years ago, when I felt that there were extensive tensions, not only in this country here but throughout the world. There was clearly a lack of sensitivity about minorities, about women, about a lot of issues that were important to me, and that we were slowly pushing aside. I felt it was like we were losing a lot of the things that we had won over the years, including the death of the civil rights movement… So I felt that we really needed Baldwin.

At the same time, I was seeing how little he meant to a new generation and how even some people were pushing him aside as either a has-been or as a minor author, which is scandalous. So I thought, it was time to bring him back and make sure that this legacy will stay. We live in a time of pictures, of images, of film. I knew that if I succeeded in making something like the essential Baldwin, that he would never go away.

The Baldwin estate has a reputation for not even answering inquiries. But I took my chance and I wrote a letter to the estate and I got the response within three days, which was exceptional.

And they invited me to come to visit them. I went to Washington and I met Gloria Karefa-Smart, James Baldwin’s younger sister, who was his assistant for many years, almost all of her life. And I just realized that she knew my films. She loved in particular “Lumumba.” And she opened everything to me. They were very patient with me. During the first four years I really tried different things. I raised money to write a screenplay. I worked with a playwright. I tried a mixed genre, between documentary and narrative. I went from pure biography to just using one of the novels. But all this was not satisfying because I knew I needed to make a film that would be exceptional and even unique in the sense that there is no way the industry would let you make one, two, three, four films on Baldwin.

One day Gloria gave me 30 pages of notes with the title Remember This House , and this letter to his literary agent. She just told me, “Here, Raoul, you will know what to do with this.” The idea of connecting Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, writing the story around those three men, who know of each of other and were even very far away from each other and came closer together and then were all three assassinated, telling the story of America through these lives and these deaths was incredible for me. And this took time. I didn’t want to have any other voice, didn’t want to have that kind of conversation, that kind of paternalistic opinion on Baldwin or expert on Baldwin. I wanted to have Baldwin.

Segura: One of the most jarring things for me about your film was hearing Baldwin’s words juxtaposed over news footage of events like the Ferguson unrest following the death of Michael Brown. And you use this to tie the civil rights movement of the 1960s to the Black Lives Matter movement of today. Even as someone who’s very familiar with all of these things, who’s very involved, it was still very shocking for me, particularly because it’s been almost 30 years since Baldwin died and everything he says seems as relevant as ever. Is that what you want audiences to take from this?

Peck: That’s the fundamental question. We see why Baldwin is efficient, because he went to those fundamental issues. And what has really changed, fundamentally, in this country? Is there less inequality? Is the problem of poverty solved? Is the problem of racism solved? No. Thirty years is nothing in the life of a country and we can’t just pretend as if everything is beautiful. That’s why this voice is essential and I can understand that the shock is real. While working on this, although I knew all those things, I was seeing how the daily news was making this story even sharper.

And yes, that was the point of it all, to make his words present. I had to link it to the layers of images, like those black and white images of the civil rights movement, the fire hose, etc. I colored them to bring them closer to today. And I used Ferguson as black-and-white footage, so that it’s a full circle. My job was to… not only put all those different layers, but put them in context and connection.

So that’s what allows you to go back and forth as a viewer, to think about it, to ask yourself: What does it mean?

Kendrick Lamar, for me, is one of the most interesting poets.

Segura: I know people have talked a lot about your choice of Samuel L. Jackson as narrator. But another thing that I particularly loved was that you ended with Kendrick Lamar’s “The Blacker the Berry.” How did you arrive at that music choice?

Peck: As I was saying, this movie has many layers and that’s what makes its quality…. And all those subtleties, that’s what makes the films rich, but also, it’s like a symphony. You use certain levels of music and rhythm in symphony. The images are one part and also the music is one. You flush out jazz, blues, spirituals, musicals, Ray Charles, Lena Horne. All this is also mapping a story, a political story.

So by the time I got to Kendrick Lamar, it’s also closing a circle and making truth of today. Kendrick Lamar, for me, is one of the most interesting poets. His political analysis uses rap and music to carry his message and his art. And I felt it was necessary to go all the way to this connection with the generation of today.

Because it’s about them. How do they learn through the work of their elders? This young generation, they are confronted with this complex world. So I felt it was important to come back to Lamar and open another window for them to get into the film, to get into these questions it’s asking.

Olga Segura is an associate editor at  America . 

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Finally, a Screenplay by James Baldwin

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By Salamishah Tillet

• Feb. 9, 2017

“I have never seen myself as a spokesman,” James Baldwin once said in an interview . “I am a witness. In the church in which I was raised, you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.”

This notion of a witness — as a person who can distinguish between falsehoods and facts, myths and truths, and whose testimony about the past can transform the fate of another — is one of the most profound themes in James Baldwin’s work. But being both a writer of and witness to America’s complex and tumultuous history was Baldwin’s calling and curse: For it often meant trying to save a nation from racial ruin at the very same time that his friends and civil rights activists Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were being killed.

Baldwin’s confrontation with this dilemma is at the heart of the filmmaker Raoul Peck’s new Oscar-nominated documentary, “ I Am Not Your Negro ,” partly based on the unfinished Baldwin manuscript “Remember This House” given to Mr. Peck by Baldwin’s sister, Gloria Karefa-Smart. In a 1979 letter to his agent, Baldwin said the book would entail “exposing myself as one of the witnesses to the lives and deaths of their famous fathers,” a reference to the children of Evers, X and King, “and it means much, much more than that.”

There have been several documentaries featuring Baldwin as subject or narrator, including the 1982 film “ I Heard It Through the Grapevine ,” but “I Am Not Your Negro” is the first one shaped entirely by Baldwin’s words. You could say he was Mr. Peck’s collaborator, and indeed Baldwin is credited as the film’s sole writer, which is fitting for an author who had been fascinated by the movies all of his life.

In this way, Mr. Peck’s film is “the capstone, the crown of these documentaries,” said Richard Blint, a scholar at the Pratt Institute who is working on a project about James Baldwin and American cinema.

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I Am Not Your Negro

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Larry A. Greene, I Am Not Your Negro, Journal of American History , Volume 106, Issue 1, June 2019, Pages 272–279, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaz326

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In the introduction to his 2017 book I Am Not Your Negro , Raoul Peck quotes Toni Morrison's personal testimony at James Baldwin's 1987 funeral, a literary eulogy to the central importance of Baldwin to her and other black writers: “You gave me a language to dwell in, a gift so perfect it seems my own invention” (p. xxi). A new millennial generation has discovered Baldwin, and he has reemerged on the popular scene with the premiere of Peck's documentary on his life and involvement in the civil rights movement, I Am Not Your Negro . The film received a 2016 Oscar nomination in the documentary category. Young activists in the Black Lives Matter movement have just discovered Baldwin. His influence on highly acclaimed young writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates is evidenced in Coates's 2015 tweet: “All of us are chasing Baldwin—even if we don't know it” (quoted in Joseph Vogel, James Baldwin and the 1980s , 2018, p. 20). Accounting for Baldwin's longevity and his creative genius as an essayist is a biographic literary technique absorbingly personal to readers, a talent that intersects with a historical vision so perceptive and analytical that both readers and the nation are placed on the proverbial psychoanalytic couch.

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• James Baldwin Documentary <i>I Am Not Your Negro</i> Is the Product of a Specific Moment in History

James Baldwin Documentary I Am Not Your Negro Is the Product of a Specific Moment in History

T hough the Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro is a brand new movie, by filmmaker Raoul Peck, it is also a historical document: the narration, delivered in the film by Samuel L. Jackson, was written by James Baldwin, one of America’s foremost public intellectuals of the 20th century, who died in 1987. The main source material was a 30-page packet of letters obtained by Peck from Baldwin’s youngest sister, Gloria, that were notes for a book project called Remember This House , which Baldwin began to propose in the late 1970s but never got to write.

Remember This Hous e was to be Baldwin’s magnum opus, a critique of American society from the viewpoint of the assassination of his friends Medgar Evers , Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr . As Peck aptly notes in the introduction to the film’s companion book , what these activists had in common had less to do with race and each man’s approach to the Black Liberation Movement, but rather that all three were “deemed dangerous” and “disposable.”

So, though the film provides a provocative analysis of American race relations up to the present day, as a testament to Baldwin’s continued relevance, an understanding of the moment when Baldwin began the project can add another layer to the movie’s meaning.

Baldwin’s straight-no-chaser style of criticism, as captured in his essay collection The Fire Next Time, had made him a household name more than a decade earlier. As a 1963 TIM E cover story about the author and activist noted, “in the U.S. today there is not another writer — white or black — who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South.”

At the heart of Baldwin’s argument was the question of who is responsible for the problem of racism, a point the film makes with Baldwin’s use of language. Never one to mince words, he wrote and spoke what Toni Morrison called in a 1987 remembrance of her friend the “undecorated truth” about the American illusion, which juxtaposed whiteness as American innocence with blackness as sullying American purity hence, “the Negro Problem.”

Such an illusion was based on what Jabari Asim in his book The N Word dubbed one of America’s “founding fictions,” the invention of a specific term to define blacks as subhuman and to lend credence to notions of white supremacy. As Asim notes, “From the outset, the British and their colonial counterparts relied on language to maximize the idea of difference between themselves and their African captives.” Yet it was far more than just a word. Asim demonstrated how over the centuries the N word became the ideological justification that codified American society and its institutions.

One of the most striking moments in I Am Not Your Negro comes from a 1963 PBS interview between Baldwin and the esteemed psychologist Kenneth Clark, whose research — produced with his research partner and wife Mamie Phipps Clark — had influenced the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. The Board of Education . Baldwin, rejecting America’s founding fiction quipped, “I am not a ‘nigger,’ I am a man!” He asserted that “the future of the country” depended on white peoples’ ability to ask themselves “why it was necessary to have a ‘nigger’ in the first place” and why they would have invented that idea.

Despite his harsh criticism, Baldwin remained hopefully optimistic that American equality was achievable. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had brought a renewed sense of hope.

But, though Baldwin’s message would essentially remain the same for the rest of his life, the world changed around him. The assassination of King in 1968 was the death knell of that period’s Civil Rights Movement, and, in the decade that followed, the assassination did not spur any great movement among white Americans to reconsider. Instead, as Carol Anderson has demonstrated in her book White Rage , a political backlash against civil rights had ensued, and politicians like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan would capitalize on opposition to civil rights victories in order to win elections. Meanwhile, Baldwin was being tracked by the FBI; as his FBI file, which spanned the years 1958-1974, attests, he was under continued surveillance.

The film captures Baldwin’s sentiments during this time with Jackson narrating, “What can I do? Well I’m tired.”

When Baldwin began work on Remember This House , he had resolved, as he stated in a 1979 speech at Berkeley, to communicate that, despite the legislative achievements of the Civil Rights Movement, blacks remained ruled by slave codes and that his fallen companions were carrying out a “modern day insurrection.” In other words, though the three assassinated men at the center of I Am Not Your Negro had given their lives to their own visions of black liberation, the film comes not from a place of simple celebration of the legacy of Evers, X and King, but from a moment when Baldwin saw, as much as ever, the need to point out to white audiences that the work those men had done had not achieved its aim, and that it was their job — white Americans — to make things better.

As he once put it , “You always told me ‘It takes time.’ It’s taken my father’s time, my mother’s time, my uncle’s time, my brothers’ and my sisters’ time. How much time do you want for your progress?”

Despite his disillusionment and his view that it was not the responsibility of blacks to fix things, Baldwin continued to use his writing and his voice throughout the 1970s and much of the 1980s as a vehicle for social change — though the world to which he spoke was a new one. On Dec. 10, 1986, almost a year before his death, Baldwin, during a Q&A session after a National Press Club lecture, insisted that the country institute “a white history week; and I’m not joking,” focused on dispelling the illusions that kept the nation in a constant state of peril.

“History is not the past,” stated Baldwin, “It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.”

Historians explain how the past informs the present

Arica L. Coleman is the author of That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia and chair of the Committee on the Status of African American, Latino/a, Asian American, and Native American (ALANA) Historians and ALANA Histories at the Organization of American Historians.

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Did I Get James Baldwin Wrong?

Stephen Casmier

Writer James Baldwin at home in Saint Paul de Vence, South of France, in 1985. Ulf Andersen/Getty Images hide caption

Writer James Baldwin at home in Saint Paul de Vence, South of France, in 1985.

In 1983, I was studying abroad in Nice, France, and while other exchange students were flitting from city to city, checking off items on their bucket lists, I craved only one European cultural experience:

I wanted to meet James Baldwin, the mandarin prophet and former boy preacher; the African-American expatriate writer who once used his European exile to explore, defy, and decry the delusional fiction of race that has organized our minds, our possibilities, our world, and now leads us toward the precipice of self-annihilation.

Baldwin changed the way I saw the world and who I thought I was as an African-American within it. He was the first writer to help me see clearly that race was a sickness that devoured both the racist and racism's victims.

That must have been why, on a spring day in 1983, I jumped into a little red convertible MG, top down, driven by an insane Corsican friend; a good-timing lady's man who proceeded to burn rubber around the kind of narrow, twisted, South-of-France mountain roads that had just killed Princess Grace of Monaco. We were headed to Saint-Paul de Vence, where I'd heard Baldwin lived.

My mind reeled back to that trip and that moment of hopeful youth as I watched Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck's documentary, I Am Not Your Negro , which was released for wide distribution on Friday .

In June, 1979, at the age of 55, Baldwin started work on what the filmmaker called a portrait of America as seen through the stories of three of his friends, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. That work, other famous Baldwin passages, and mesmerizing videotaped interviews provide the soundtrack against stunning images that move the documentary from the recent riots near my home in St. Louis, Mo., to footage and photographs taken during the Civil Rights era.

'I Am Not Your Negro' Gives James Baldwin's Words New Relevance

The effect of the film on me was staggering. The despairing James Baldwin on the screen was so different from the hopeful figure I thought I understood.

"To look around the United States today," Baldwin says at one point, "is enough to make prophets and angels weep."

In the film, I deeply felt Baldwin's despair that followed the murders of his friends. But I felt none of the hope that I read in his writings; hope that somehow the struggle against racism could be won.

As I watched the film, I feared that the title of Peck's documentary spoke directly to me, though I had read and reread (almost memorizing) many of the passages from Baldwin's work that actor Samuel L. Jackson incants in a deep, gravely voice that is definitely not my own, and definitely not that of the writer.

I felt implicated when Baldwin said in the film, "I was in some way in those years, without entirely realizing it, the Great Black Hope of the great white father." In my reverent memory of him, had I, too, made him into the "Negro," the "Great Black Hope," who would save America from itself? Had I, too, leaned too heavily for optimism on the man loving friends called "Jimmy"?

The Baldwin of my father's books

I first became aware of Baldwin during my junior year abroad, years after his urgent usefulness as a civil rights figure had passed. My family never understood why I wanted to go to France, though there was a history of African-American intellectuals expatriating there during the Jim Crow years. I was raised middle class and comfortable in a white St. Louis suburb. Jim Crow was a bad American memory by then, and there was overtly nothing to flee. Still, before I left for Europe, my father, who taught African-American literature at a community college, linked me forever to the exiled writer. The night before I boarded my flight, he handed me a stack of books.

Over the coming months, as I read Notes of a Native Son , The Fire Next Time , the anthology Black Voices , and the short stories gathered in Going to Meet the Man , Baldwin's voice and thinking transformed even the way I used language. It was magical.

In a eulogy after Baldwin's death in 1987, poet Amiri Baraka defined this magic.

"Jimmy Baldwin was the creator of contemporary American speech even before Americans could dig that," Baraka wrote. "He created it so we could speak to each other at unimaginable intensities of feeling, so we could make sense to each other at higher and higher tempos."

Baldwin had given voice to my submerged thoughts about what it meant to be a black person, indissolubly and meaningfully connected to the larger world. Somehow, I felt that meeting him would also give meaning to my stay in France and help me understand the unfinished business of race relations that still haunted the American imagination.

So when my Corsican friend stepped into the French café where I was peacefully sipping a stream of bitter espressos and asked if anyone wanted to help him test-drive the used car he'd just bought, I was game.

"Let's go to Saint-Paul de Vence," I said, though I had no idea where Baldwin actually lived, or even if he was home.

Thirty years before I decided to risk my life on that trip, Baldwin left the United States for France to save his own life; not from the evils of Jim Crow, but from the ever-more threatening, fixed notions of an identity that he witnessed slowly killing his father and his friends and transforming him into just another unseen and expendable black boy.

In 1984, he told an interviewer for the Paris Review that he "knew what it meant to be white and I knew what it meant to be a nigger, and I knew what was going to happen to me. My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed. My best friend had committed suicide two years earlier, jumping off the George Washington Bridge."

"I don't know how it will come about," Baldwin said of America's racial reconciliation. "But no matter how it comes about it will be bloody. It will be hard." RALPH GATTI/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

"I don't know how it will come about," Baldwin said of America's racial reconciliation. "But no matter how it comes about it will be bloody. It will be hard."

I wanted to meet the man with such a singular take on what it meant to live abroad. In one of the books my father gave me, Baldwin described the roots of his identity as a unique, roving figure. With no trace of shame, he told the poet Dan Georgakas: "I'm a black, funky, raggedy-ass shoeshine boy. If I forget that, it's the end of me."

As the red MG sped toward Saint-Paul de Vence, I closed my eyes to the distant azure sea and idyllic countryside flashing by and imagined meeting the brilliant consciousness that was Baldwin. I dreamt of the meeting the way jazz musicians dream of sitting in a jam session with the master who influenced their style, hoping to sound out crudely formed thoughts and hear them echo back, perfectly honed and now riding the air forever

I never shined shoes. I was raised in a precariously middle class home. But I recognized the shoeshine boy deep in myself. My Mississippi-born mother knocked into me and my five siblings the hard lesson that we were no better than anyone else. Learning French and earning a doctorate wouldn't change that. Nor would literally buying into the racial and class roles of a society deeply organized around what Baldwin called "black-white madness."

So, for me, Baldwin, the self-described "slave in exile," was the most impossible, volatile and dangerous of all figures. Because of him, I rejected the easy comfort, the endlessly shopping, touristic gaze of superior identity that the other exchange students embraced. He widely critiqued all forms of oppression, forging, perhaps, the foundation of a new order, a new identity, a new consciousness. This was the hope I saw in Jimmy Baldwin.

But James Baldwin, the man I saw on the screen as I watched I Am Not Your Negro, had little of that hope.

He was like the original "slave in exile"

The rear wheels of the English sports car suddenly skidded toward the edge of a cliff and I closed my eyes rather than witness my own death. With athletic reflexes sharpened on even narrower roads in Corsica, my friend recovered. I struggled to find an acceptable, macho way of asking him to slow down.

Still, I could appreciate the beauty that surrounded me. The man I was going to see saw something else. Baldwin shared a view with the original slave in exile, Frederick Douglass. Both lodged themselves firmly in the role of the underdog and spoke on behalf of the oppressed.

Douglass relentlessly identified with – and refused to position himself above – the lowliest of the earth, les misérables , who had been discarded and sacrificed for the sake of European patriarchal identity.

When he traveled to Europe toward the end of his life, Douglass visited more than the great monuments. He chose to tour sites of oppression, narrating an alternative history of the West through the eyes of its victims. Like Baldwin, he went to France and saw more than beauty at the papal palace in Avignon. There, he said it "required no effort of the imagination to create visions of the Inquisition, to see the terror-stricken faces, the tottering forms, and pleading tears of the accused, and the saintly satisfaction of the inquisitors."

Through his imagination and writing, the beaten slave and the murdered heretic melded into one.

Baldwin used his European experience to craft in 1953 one of his most powerful essays, "Stranger in the Village." His visit to the cathedral at Chartres and the crypt beneath helped him to define the parasitic nature of racial identity in a way that came to organize my thinking – and perhaps that of everyone who read and understood him.

"... I am terrified by the slippery bottomless well to be found in the crypt, down which heretics were hurled to death, and by the obscene, inescapable gargoyles jutting out of the stone and seeming to say that God and the devil can never be divorced. I doubt that the villagers think of the devil when they face a cathedral because they have never been identified with the devil. But I must accept the status which myth, if nothing else, gives me in the West before I can hope to change the myth."

This was the Jimmy Baldwin I thought I knew. This was the man who exposed with surgical clarity the devastating myth of racial identity while clinging to the gospel that the truth would set us free. He had set me free. Before I read Baldwin, for example, Black History Month seemed like a kindly gesture of inclusion made by the larger society. It had not yet occurred to me that omitting African-Americans from the teaching of history in the first place did as much damage to the oppressed as to the oppressor, because it gave them a warped and fictitious sense of reality and of themselves. Baldwin made that point in the 1964 interview with Dan Georgakas.

Oscar Documentaries And A Foreign Language Film We Loved

"I want American history taught," he told the poet. "Unless I'm in that book, you're not in it either."

At the heart of his thought, I surmised, was the skinny, black shoeshine boy, popping and snapping his rag as he looked up knowingly into the clouded eyes of a customer who didn't see him back, whose world deliberately and perilously didn't include him. Baldwin helped me realize that such a customer (who almost believes his shoes shine themselves) is as unreal to himself as the invisible shoeshine boy is to him.

Like Jimmy , I thought the dawning of this realization in white people would be our salvation, that somehow, if we could understand it, if we put the right words to it, if it is stated clearly, we could come to see the error of our ways. Getting people to realize this about themselves embodied the hopefulness I read in in his work.

But after I watched I'm Not Your Negro, I wondered if my image of Baldwin – of Jimmy – was inaccurate. In the film, he invokes the shoeshine boy when he explains that he rejected membership in the NAACP because of its "black class distinctions that repelled a shoeshine boy like me." But in this latest rendering of Baldwin, there is little of the Christian humanist hope; the Great Black Hope of reconciliation through mental emancipation. Instead, the film moves James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr. much closer to the militant ideas of Malcolm X; the notion that change could only come through violent confrontation.

"Malcolm was one of the people Martin saw on the mountaintop," Baldwin says cryptically in the unfinished essay about his friends. He acknowledges that he and Malcolm X "were simply trapped in the same situation."

The James Baldwin of this film doesn't seem to believe in reconciliation triggered by the exploding of myths.

"Well, I am tired," Baldwin says in the film. "I don't know how it will come about. But no matter how it comes about it will be bloody. It will be hard."

He asked me to call him "Jimmy"

The medieval, hilltop village of Saint-Paul de Vence, was a beautiful, walled hamlet, and as the red MG slowed to match the scenery, I wondered what it must be like to be a writer living in such a place. My friend seemed unmoved. No village outside of Corsica held any beauty for him.

We stopped the car, and I accosted shoppers at a flower market and disturbed men as they played leisurely games of pétanque on the hardened dirt. I asked if they could tell me where James Baldwin lived. They seemed puzzled. They thought I was asking about James Bond, who maybe lived around there, too, and drove a red sports car.

Baldwin with friend and civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. hide caption

The trip was a sad (and terrifying) failure. And while I did not die that day, I didn't meet Baldwin, either. That would come four years later, when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and he was invited to speak during Black History Month. A student had been asked to drive Baldwin around and invited me to go along. This ride was calm, slower, on wider streets.

Baldwin looked like his pictures, though he was dressed in a surprising, cutting-edge, tailored suit. He was kind and smiling, and like most writers, shy and reticent. We drove him to dinner and then to give his talk, after which he fielded questions about Alice Walker, The Color Purple and African-American women writers who air black America's dirty laundry. "What's wrong with airing dirty laundry?" he characteristically asked. "Besides, I think it's healthy."

Later that night, I finally had my chance to jam with Baldwin. I sat next to him in a rundown lounge on the south side of Chicago. He listened distantly as the jukebox played Billie Holiday, a friend he would join in the hereafter just a few months later. Regretfully, I did too much talking, and my words simply dissipated into the air. Who could compete with Lady Day?

When I stiffly called him "Mr. Baldwin," he asked me to call him "Jimmy."

"Jimmy," Amiri Baraka says in the film, "always made us feel good. He always made us know we were dangerously intelligent and as courageous as the will to be free."

He could do that while surgically dissecting the malignancies of racism in his homeland. At 29, Baldwin shook the American consciousness with the prescient "Stranger in the Village," where he spelled out the dangers of what is now called American exceptionalism:

"I do not think ... that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world — which allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and white-- owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged. It is only now beginning to be borne in on us — very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will — that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality. People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster."

It was a call to consciousness. Now, those warnings, coming from the James Baldwin of I Am Not Your Negro, sound more like the fulfillment of a despairing prophecy.

The film resounds with this sense of imminent catastrophe, pronounced in Samuel L. Jackson's ponderous reading, with little of the mannerisms or hopeful affect of Baldwin's younger persona — or of the withdrawn, 62-year-old man I met in Chicago. The cumulative effect of the film and its arrangement of sound and image is the emergence of a figure defined by such potent words as "trapped," "bitter," "enemy," "vengeance," and "helpless rage."

There seems little escape for Americans.

"These people," Baldwin says, "have deluded themselves so long, they really don't think I'm human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means ... they have become moral monsters."

It's a sobering conclusion. With the specter of police shootings, violent protests, nativism, and the resurgence of white supremacy following the November election, I fear he was right.

Stephen Casmier is an associate professor in the Department of English at Saint Louis University.

• Martin Luther King Jr.
• Amiri Baraka
• I am not your negro
• james baldwin
• Frederick Douglass
• Medgar Evers
• Billie Holiday
• race relations
• Samuel L. Jackson

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• lesson plans
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I Am Not Your Negro Summary & Study Guide

I Am Not Your Negro Summary & Study Guide Description

Raoul Peck, the director of the film version of I Am Not Your Negro, introduces the companion book with the story of the film's genesis. A lifelong admirer of Baldwin and his work, Peck hoped to create a film which would pay homage to Baldwin, while also presenting him in a light he had not been seen before. With the help of Baldwin's younger sister, Gloria, who manages his estate and has kept his personal and literary papers well-preserved, Peck gained access to all manner of essays and letters by Baldwin. Crucially, Gloria also provided Peck with a copy of Remember This House, a manuscript which Baldwin had been working on before his death. In these pages, Baldwin intended to bear witness to the lives and legacies of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, all of whom were Baldwin's friends and who were famously murdered for their roles in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. This manuscript, which dissects the underlying truths about racism in America, provides the framework for I Am Not Your Negro. Peck supplements Baldwin's claims with film and media clips, particularly during in discussing media representation and in tying the conflicts of the past with those of today.

According to the text, Baldwin's status as a Civil Rights Movement insider provided him with personal insights to enrich our existing historical understanding of these three men, and many others, such as Sammy Davis and Lorraine Hansberry. In the manuscript, Baldwin articulates his need to witness, write about, and spread widely the traumatic experience of being black in America, which he considers his duty as a Civil Rights activist and writer. He examines, in his writings, the perpetuation of white America's dominant narrative, in which the white man is the hero in film, television and other media. These are skillfully combined, through the directorial discretion of Raoul Peck, with images from the films which are referenced and which substantiate Baldwin's claims. Possibly the most lucid and uncompromising voice in the entire Civil Rights Movement, Baldwin here articulates the suffering of black people in the United States Through Peck's guidance in both the film and its companion book, the audience learn through Baldwin's words how much work there is yet to be done until racial equality is achieved in the United States.

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Madison Middleton May 2, 2019 “I Am Not Your Negro” Response

When the rocket took off and suddenly filmmaker Raoul Peck showed us the desolate landscape of Mars, my attention piqued. I wondered why Peck had chosen to launch his movie out of this world. As the camera panned over the sandy red planet, Samuel L. Jackson as the voice of James Baldwin began to speak:

“White people are astounded by Birmingham. Black people aren’t. White people are endlessly demanding to be reassured that Birmingham is really on Mars. They don’t want to believe, still less to act on the belief, that what is happening in Birmingham is happening all over the country.”

Immediately, this moment reminded me of our recent class discussions. After many heated statements about Tony Hoagland’s “The Change,” Professor Cassarino informed us that, in her experience, only her white students were disturbed by the piece. Her students of colour were seemingly less moved by Hoagland’s racially charged speaker. James Baldwin’s words come back to me: “White people are endlessly demanding to be reassured that Birmingham is really on Mars.” By becoming upset with Hoagland’s poem, was I seeking social and personal assurance that my white peers didn’t feel the same way as Hoagland’s speaker? Was I trying to reassure myself that this type of racism didn’t occur within our classroom or in the minds of my white classmates? And why hadn’t Professor Cassarino’s students of colour appeared shocked by this poem? I wondered when watching “I Am Not Your Negro” if the answer was in the frequency of racialized thought. As we discussed today, author Robin DiAngelo remarked on how a person of colour must be present for a situation to appear racialized. In this sense, a black person’s race is always in question or at the forefront of an interaction. Were the black people Baldwin referred to not astounded by Birmingham because they lived that reality every day of their lives? The security of not thinking about race is one of privilege. The security of perceiving racism as far from oneself is one of privilege, too. While Baldwin and his peers lived and fought for their human rights, the country and its president turned its attention to the moon, Mars, and outer space. This most profoundly shows us the privilege afforded in America; Some are forced to eternally think about the colour of their skin, while others can dream of flying to the moon.

In many ways, as the documentary I Am Not Your Negro incorporated film, images, narration, letters, dance, advertisements, this mixed-media piece can be seen as similar to parts the lyric, “Citizen”, by Claudia Rankine as both used numerous mediums to express and critique the racial inequalities and disparities in the nation. The documentary displayed many scenes of African American movements ranging from nonviolent marches led by Martin Luther King Jr., to recent Black Lives Matter protests. The film visually illuminated the parallels between the movements to reveal how even after half a century, the ways in which racial inequalities and prejudices perpetuate and manifest to present day. A stark difference between the movements is the increase in militarization and advancement in technology used as a violent response to protests. The videos and images shown from Black Lives Matter movements illustrate the direct policing of African Americans and with the lens of “Citizen”, Rankine argues that policing is an every day occurrence for people of color in interactions, not solely in response to displayed resistance.

The use of color as well as black and white film in this documentary played a strategic role alongside the narration. In one particular scene, as the narration claims that America is half white and half black, Baldwin stresses that there is a necessity to build the nation together, rather than separate and segregated. In this moment, the black and white film of a social event flashes to becomes shown in color and full of life. The abrupt transition from black and white to color visually represents the hope of working together, and the color and change that comes with that.

Baldwin’s words really highlight the denial of the white perspective. He cites Birmingham as an example of otherness, and a beginning of sorts. Then there is the presence of hate and love within the Civil Rights Movement, especially within the contrast of the King and Malcolm X philosophy. In essence, the documentary highlights the benefits of both approaches to justice, celebrating Baldwin’s admiration for the both of them. Baldwin even suggests that towards the end of the their lives, they were similar in their philosophies. Death in this documentary also carries a heavy weight throughout its unfolding. And although the death of King, Malcolm X, Medgar, and even Baldwin permeate the storyline, the life of their work lives through the energy of their words and the movements that they left behind. It’s no surprise then that the riots and protests that we see today picture the same as those that Baldwin lived through. This artistic choice further emphasizes the parallels of today versus then. The shots of today’s America make Baldwin’s words alive in the modern struggle. The choice of shots in Time Square, rioting elsewhere and beyond makes the Civil Rights Movement still a movement working its way through our culture.

The moment that most impacted me while watching this documentary was seeing early footage of Mars as James Baldwin’s narration talks about how white people “are astounded by Birmingham”. It seems out of the blue, something from Mars. White people cannot accept that racism is everywhere, from Birmingham to Los Angeles. It’s easier to believe Birmingham is something alien to America. It’s easier to believe that it’s an Us vs Them kind of situation, where white people can watch the TV in shock but without the need to do anything because Birmingham isn’t in America, but on Mars. Baldwin believes that this kind of thinking that is one of the obstacles to progress. White Americans cannot accept the fact that they are all the same, that they share ancestors and history and created a country with the black American. The white man is terrified of the idea that he is not pure, that this terrifying “entity in his mind” of the black man, created by his “guilty and constricted white imagination”, is indeed inside of him. This terror is what makes the idea of segregation so popular. With segregation, you don’t have to know what’s happening on the other side, because you don’t want to know. White Americans can live safe on another planet, and “safeguard their purity.” Unfortunately, Baldwin points out, in attempting to safeguard their purity and live on this alien planet, they have become “criminals and monsters.”

Zack Maluccio Literary Borders 5/2/19

“God forgives murder, and he forgives adultery, but He looks down on anyone who supports integration.”

Raoul Peck’s documentarian interpretation of James Baldwin’s undrafted manuscript Remember this House is a beautiful example of how storytelling can often better depict the gross injustices of racism better than any analytical essay on the subject. Within the film, Peck juxtaposes audio from the movie with the film’s general narration. The first, notable example, is the quote above, told by a white woman in a TV interview. The argument itself, that God will forgive certain things that society has grown more accustomed to but cast down what makes society uncomfortable, exists in a new form in the present day; it perhaps has always existed in some manner or the other. Contemporarily, LGBTQ rights come to mind as an example of Christianity being used as a framework for tradition, saying that the institution of marriage belongs solely to a man and woman. In addition, the scene involving the detective and the sheriff spoke out to me alongside Baldwin’s dialogue. It may not be an explicit signal of love, but, as Baldwin puts it, the scene is a symbol of reconciliation.

Augie Schultz Prof. Cassarino 5/1/19

“It is only sporadically and unwillingly the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

Raoul Peck’s film “I’m not Your Negro,” narrated by James Baldwin’s writing and Samuel L. Jackson’s voice delves into the discrimination and racism Black people have suffered throughout the gestation of the United States. Unlike Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, the film touches on myriad consequential historical events like the Little Rock Nine, particularly Dorothy Brown’s bravery. Fascinatingly, the two works of art appeal to the reader differently, as they distinguish the fine line between sympathy and empathy. Instead of using subjectivity—poetry, visual art, anecdotes—to catalyze its message, “I’m not Your Negro” attempts to tackle racism with objective truths and emphasis of historical events. The film elicits sympathy with visuals of the gut-wrenching cruelties like police violence and citizen-driven hate crimes, while Citizen elicits empathy through second-person narration, placing the reader in the role of the “other” and illustrating what it’s like to be Black in America today. Sadly, James Baldwin’s fervent words that articulate the state of America before 1970 still hold weight today. The discrimination and oppression he writes of are not dissolved and the atrocities Black Americans persevere through everyday resemble the unfairness Baldwin articulates almost fifty years ago. In many ways, Citizen can be seen as a continuation of Baldwin’s message, just in a different medium tackling racism with a different methodology.

Cecilia Needham May 2, 2019 I Am Not Your Negro Response

In James Baldwin’s words of Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, he comments many times about how the fate of America is up to the white man to overcome his fear of his fellow black citizens. Baldwin says we must come to terms with who we are as Americans and the history we carry in order to make any sort of progress towards racial equality and a positive future. He says, “The future of the Negro in this country is entirely as bright or dark as the future of the country…It is entirely up to the American country.” In his explanation of the train movie featured, he says that that the black man does not in fact hate the white man, he just wants him out of him and his children’s way. On the other hand, the white man’s hate for the black man is born out of a terror, but one that exists only in his mind. More than the simple terror of the “danger” black people pose, the terror of relinquishing power is all the more present here. Baldwin says that the world may not be white because “white is simply a word for describing power”. Thus, the rights of black people threaten the very whiteness that holds the American societal structure together, even today. Whiteness is contingent on the oppression non-whiteness, and Baldwin says we must come to terms with this reality in order to challenge it and see a better tomorrow for our country.

I Am Not Your Negro is a film riddled with numerous instances of different types of racial interaction and perspective. There were two parts of the movie to me that were particularly striking. The first comes around the 44th minute, in a soliloquy in which Baldwin says “It is not a racial problem. It’s a problem of whether or not you’re willing to look at your life and be responsible for it, and then begin to change it.” I really was intrigued by this line of thought, which I believe was intended to extract the issue of race into a more human issue of empathy and self-reflection. Baldwin’s ideas express the way in which the issue of race is self-preserving: in viewing race as a defining factor in the argument of equality and human rights, the existence of race as a human made construct is perpetuated. The second scene that I found most striking occurs at 59:50. In this scene, a cinematic transition is made between black and white and color. In the black and white portion (prior to the transition), a speech is being given by Baldwin. At the time listed above, his speech concludes, and the applause begins. It is at this point when the scene switches to color imagery. I felt as though this cinematic decision by Peck was made with the implication that it stood for a greater example of black and white interaction. When a minority member of society is speaking or acting, they are in control, yet they are under the speculation of white culture, and white society therefore is in control of the reaction.

Raoul Peck brings James Baldwin’s emotion, passion, and charisma back to life, as Peck uses the messages and narration of one of the most influential figures of the Civil Rights movements, in order to frame racism America as a story of of past and our present. Through Peck’s choice to only use James Baldwin’s voice, he frames the film within the the Civil Rights Movement, yet the way his narration transcends into present day footage of police brutality forces a stark realization upon the viewer: racism, whether implicit or explicit, is still a pressing civic issue, upon which every citizen is responsible to respond. In an interview with Peck on the Hollywood Reporter, he described how he chose to only use the word’s of James Baldwin because he wanted the viewer to think through Baldwin’s framework. Rather than using expert opinions, Peck used the voice of a deceased man who was influential in the mid-20th century, which makes the relevancy of his words in today’s society even more horrifying.

Unlike textbooks and classes in high school regarding racism, this film was directed by a Haitian man and is portrayed through the perspective of an influential black activist instead of being taught by a white guy in a book written by white guys. This new perspective reframed my understanding, and the potency of Baldwin’s words when mirrored with images such as police brutality and Trayvon Martin’s murder was eloquently terrible. Baldwin died before the age of social media in which everything can be recorded, and finally people can understand and witness the oppressive brutality against African Americans. Even so, much of the time, these brutalized, often murdered victims get no justice, and police walk away with their jobs. Though Baldwin’s words are astoundingly relevant in today’s society, I wonder activists such as he, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X would be saying in modern America. How would they try to combat an “equal” America that is still ingrained in marginalizing systematic racism?

I Am Not Your Negro Response William Blastos Literary Borders Cassarino

I Am Not Your Negro is an emotionally engaging film that, through the voice of James Baldwin, chronicles and documents the fight for racial equality in the US from a uniquely black perspective. Having spent most of my life in Connecticut, New Jersey, and Maine my education surrounding the fight for racial equality came from white teachers and old textbooks written by white authors. I never was shown the black perspective of these movements, movements that were started by black activists. I think what makes this film uniquely powerful is that it is told from an exclusively black perspective. The white people in this film are portrayed as the others, and it is the black activists who fought against racial injustice that are telling the story of their own fight. However, the film transcends the boundaries of a film about the civil right movement or about police brutality in that is spans both. From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the murders of Trayvon Martin, I Am Not Your Negro explores much of the history of the fight against racial injustices through the eyes of an observer and participant in this fight.

I think the facet of this film that was most striking to see was the imagery of violence against black people at the hands of police and white civilians alike, as well as the violently hateful rhetoric that appeared in graffiti and on the posters of protesters. The clips of the aftermath of lynchings are the most haunting. This is yet another way this film is unique. History books have not recorded the evil and violent treatment of people of color in American history, and Peck puts these ugly pieces of American history into a modern context. These events are not fully behind us, and their portrayal serves as a reminder that there is still work to be done. I Am Not Your Negro is a sobering account of racial inequality from its origins through its place in modern times.

Around 18:17, there is a shot of a car window with a small crack in it as the windshield wipers brush away the rain. The crack could represent what Baldwin mentions: black people seeing white society, so close to as to be able to crack the race barrier, but realizing that a black citizen can’t quite make the push into equal rights. One quote describes how white society never quite wants to look into the window to realize the unequal difference, hoping instead for blissful ignorance. “White people are endlessly demanding to be reassured that Birmingham is really on Mars…They don’t want to believe still, less to act on the belief, that what is happening in Birmingham is happening all over the country.” Only after years of struggle, of in the face images and speeches and demonstrations did anything change, and yet the images in I Am Not Your Negro flash between civil rights era and current day footage. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen speaks to the still prevalent but more easy to ignore discrimination in the twenty-first century. White people still want to laugh off and forget what should be so clear, and the pushback that many black artists receive for their art pieces that are interpreted as always being about injustice paints a dirty picture of the change still needed long after the deaths of the three leaders presented in the film.

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I Am Not Your Negro

• Writer James Baldwin tells the story of race in modern America with his unfinished novel, Remember This House.
• In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project, "Remember This House." The book was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and assassinations of three of his close friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time of Baldwin's death in 1987, he left behind only 30 completed pages of this manuscript. Filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished. — Jwelch5742
• Through Samuel L. Jackson 's familiar voice, Raoul Peck 's bold and brutally honest documentary animates the crisp and noble words of the African-American writer, civil rights activist, poet, and thinker, James Baldwin . Expressing bitter truths while documenting centuries of covert or unapologetic racism, Baldwin's uncompleted thirty-page manuscript, "Remember this House", was meant to be the sadly veracious chronicle of the American history, through the intertwined stories of the fallen heroes and assassinated friends: Martin Luther King , Medgar Evers , and Malcolm X . Is James Baldwin's complex endeavour to document the hopelessness of the black people still relevant today? Are we doomed to repeat the same calamitous mistakes of an ignoble past? — Nick Riganas
• Based on Baldwin's unfinished manuscript Remember This House - a stirring, personal account of the lives and deaths of his friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. - acclaimed director Raoul Peck creates a meditation on what it means to be Black in the United States, using meticulously assembled archival footage and driven by stirring voiceover narration from Samuel L. Jackson.

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The Great Divide

By Andrew Chan in the January-February 2017 Issue

Sometime during the honeymoon phase of the Obama era, there was a multiplex pre-roll promo that depicted moviegoers of various races sitting together in a theater, taking in the assimilating raptures of the screen with fresh-faced, uniform sanguinity. We’re all the same in the dark, or so the tagline may as well have read. It would have been absurd to feel affronted by such contrived naïveté, which after all was just another example of branded, Benetton-style pluralism patting itself on the back in an allegedly post-racial world. What did sting, though, was the realization that even this hollow gesture was hard-won, that this recognition of racial unity in a public space would have been inconceivable just a half-century before. If classic Hollywood had ever tried being kinder to people of color, such a utopian fantasy might have asserted itself with greater force much earlier in our history—perhaps as an outgrowth of the idea, propagated in films like The Crowd and Sullivan’s Travels , that the movies are where we go to escape the real-world contingencies that isolate us from one another. When we talk about the communal enterprise of moviegoing, the underlying assumption still seems to be that, in surrendering to the universality of the screen, we should hold all of our inconvenient identities in abeyance.

One imagines James Baldwin would have had none of that. In his most sustained commentary on cinema, the 1976 book-length essay The Devil Finds Work , he gives voice to the suspicion and anger that many movie lovers feel toward an art form that not only fails to represent them but insists on slandering them at every turn. One of Baldwin’s most boldly digressive works, the essay shifts between recollections of childhood, accounts of the writer’s own experiences in the movie industry, and unsparing interpretations of the racial knowledge inscribed in everything from the “straight, narrow, lonely back” of Joan Crawford to the respectability politics of Sidney Poitier. At the heart of these scattershot musings is a liberating idea that flies in the face of film criticism’s traditional reliance on textual exegesis and aesthetic appreciation. For Baldwin, cinema opens the mind up to a kind of free-associative soul-searching. The experience of a film lives at the intersection between an entrancing, dreamlike medium and each viewer’s own incoherent repository of hopes, fears, memories, and moral convictions.

Anyone married to the belief that critics should stick to parsing what’s on screen will balk at the rhetorical leaps that Baldwin takes with a film like The Exorcist , whose “mindless and hysterical” conception of evil prompts him to rail against the graver horrors of racism, poverty, and war. Yet who would deny that the ability to evoke such subjective, even willful responses—which have everything to do with those identities we’re called to relinquish in the darkness—are what give movies their power to wound and enrage? If the photographic properties of film, as Bazin argued, guarantee “an image that is a reality of nature,” then for viewers of color it can only be a dystopian nature, one in which almost all meaningful traces of one’s own people have been debased or omitted.

Joseph Mankiewicz and James Baldwin merging with the crowd, © Dan Budnik

In some of the most striking passages in the new documentary I Am Not Your Negro , director Raoul Peck implicitly connects The Devil Finds Work with the tradition of Marlon Riggs’s Ethnic Notions and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled , films that reimagine cinematic history as a site of racial excavation. Peck’s film sets out to make use of the unfinished manuscript of Remember This House , Baldwin’s late-career attempt to grapple with the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers, but it soon abandons this premise for the kind of emotional detours that give some of Baldwin’s best work its freewheeling, capacious spirit. One of the film’s strategies is to pair the voice of Samuel L. Jackson intoning selections from Baldwin’s writing with relevant images salvaged from American history, including segments that highlight the white supremacy encoded in Hollywood narratives. With Baldwin as his guiding light, Peck delivers an indictment of cinema that ultimately covers more ground than either Riggs or Lee did. He’s not just identifying moments where pop culture’s twisted racial logic is made blatant, as in King Kong or John Wayne westerns or the career of Stepin Fetchit. He’s suggesting that, for those who internalize the pain of these offenses, the comparatively innocent whiteness of someone like Doris Day looks like nothing less than an emblem of moral rot.

There’s a studiousness to I Am Not Your Negro that serves as a counterpoint to Baldwin’s impassioned, off-the-cuff soliloquies, which take the spotlight in several excerpts from the writer’s TV interviews and public appearances. Peck balances the sometimes explosive heat of his star with an arsenal of footage, photographs, and text, unleashed in brilliantly edited bursts that call to mind the cumulative power of Leo Hurwitz’s leftist documentary classic Strange Victory . Among the artifacts on display are images of racial violence across the decades, some of which seem to have been chosen for their numbing familiarity. Peck also seamlessly integrates the terrifying iconography of our Black Lives Matter era (a video of Eric Garner, a photo of Trayvon Martin), disregarding the distinctions between past and present that have sometimes caused friction between black activism’s old and new guard. In perhaps his trickiest maneuver, Peck interweaves impressionistic shots of contemporary America—of highways, train tracks, and the consumerist spectacle of Times Square—to imply that, when you exist as a racialized subject, it can be difficult to go anywhere without projecting the anxieties of one’s oppression onto the landscape. Once examined, the specter of racism is hard to unsee.

If there’s an overriding tone that emerges from this assemblage of found material, it’s one of spiritual weariness. Due to the exigencies of transforming hearts and minds, most American documentaries about racism adopt a mood that can galvanize an audience into action, typically landing on a note of empathy or outrage, or, in the case of Ava DuVernay’s recent 13TH , a tightly constructed sense of factual mastery. But watching I Am Not Your Negro four long years after the death of Trayvon Martin, and mere weeks after the election of Donald Trump, it’s hard to ignore the question that Peck and Baldwin have left unanswered: where does all this evidence get us? For centuries, anti-racist movements of various ideological stripes have hinged on the belief that public opinion could be shaped by the dissemination of certain persuasive truths. For towering figures like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington—those who were touted as “extraordinary negroes” in the press and political establishment—the focus was on rendering irrefutable the intellectual equality of black people. In the past half-century, we’ve seen a new emphasis on uncovering, at ever-increasing degrees of intimacy and veracity, the realities of white violence and black suffering. As our national mythology would have it, it was not until Bull Connor unleashed dogs and fire hoses on black protesters in 1963 that white people had the chance to come to grips with the evils of Jim Crow. We are accustomed to thinking that if only the truth would out itself, the world could be so different—as if this truth had not already been in plain sight.

"Two Minute Warning," Spider Martin, 1965

We live in a time that has proven to us, again and again, that all the visual evidence in the world will not lead to the conviction of those who have killed unarmed African-Americans in cold blood. In the face of this futility, it’s tempting to feel nostalgic for some dreamed past in which the political efficacy of the self-evident might have seemed on sturdier ground. I Am Not Your Negro does not succumb to such nostalgia. Echoing the powerful 1982 documentary I Heard It Through the Grapevine , in which an aging Baldwin journeys through the Deep South to take stock of the little that has changed in the decades since the civil rights movement, Peck’s film burrows deep into the contradictions of a nation in which the sheer inertia of social change has been disguised by feel-good monuments and heroic symbolism. The film also shares its dejected mood with other recent odysseys through racist America, most notably Arthur Jafa’s lyrical documentary Dreams Are Colder Than Death , which captures the feelings of disorientation and fatigue that racism induces in its victims, and Claudia Rankine’s extraordinary prose poem Citizen , which documents a series of everyday microaggressions with crisp, almost clinical immediacy. If the average American has been taught to envision the arc of the universe bending toward justice, then Baldwin’s restlessly self-questioning voice offers a counterargument to such deeply ingrained moral certitude, an admission of doubt uncannily aligned with some of the defining anti-racist works of our moment.

The recent resurgence of interest in baldwin has admittedly robbed I Am Not Your Negro of some of its sense of discovery. And since the film is structured to always take him at his word, it ends up smoothing over the complexities of a writer who always seemed at odds with his own impulses. The great risk of applying Baldwin’s words to our present-day horrors is that it lends his work an undue semblance of prophecy. But Baldwin was no clairvoyant, and this false projection only allows us to interpret the persistence of injustice as somehow inevitable, deflecting our collective responsibility to eradicate the ills he diagnosed. When we listen to Baldwin disassemble the logic of racism, as this film gives us ample chance to do, we are responding not to the man’s foresight but to his courage to speak from within the specificity of his own time and place. As we hear in his words on the voiceover, Baldwin was reluctant to align himself with the class aspirationalism of the NAACP, the aggression of the Black Panthers, or the piety of the Nation of Islam or the black church. For this, people like Eldridge Cleaver accused him of being a sycophant starved for white approval. And yet Baldwin’s resistance to being taken for an obedient mouthpiece for the movement is everywhere to be seen in the ferocious way he plays his audience and dominates each space he enters, swooping his arms through the air, taking flamboyant drags from a cigarette, and, as a former junior minister, modulating his church-honed cadences to land a particularly righteous punch line.

In his wide and wicked smile, you can see that Baldwin knew he was destined not just for the page but for the camera. Despite the imperiousness of his on-screen persona, his vulnerability lay in a transparent need to be understood by his listeners, including the white ones. It was not a contradiction for him on the one hand to openly pity white people for their moral deficiencies (“There is little in the white man’s public or private life that one should desire to imitate,” he wrote in The Fire Next Time ), while on the other acknowledge them as loved family members whose betrayal he longed to one day forgive (“We, the black and the white, deeply need each other”). This push-pull between rebuke and reconciliation is what makes even a resolutely disillusioned political documentary like this one inherently frustrating. Baldwin famously expressed disdain for the narrow confines of the protest-art tradition, but even his writing cannot avoid the desire to connect with the same oppressor from whom he must also establish an unequivocal independence. Similarly, for all the catharsis that some viewers of color may experience upon seeing their reality corroborated on the big screen, it’s hard not to feel like Peck’s address—for better and for worse—is squarely directed at an imagined white “you,” whose emotional response to the material will serve as a measure of its effectiveness.

“When you lookin’ at me, tell me, what do you see?” spits Kendrick Lamar on To Pimp a Butterfly , the Album of the Moment that I Am Not Your Negro invokes over its closing credits. For many people of color, the line registers as a purely rhetorical question intended to rouse the addressee; the answers, after all, are already known by the asker. In one startling scene near the end of the film, Peck all but re-creates this question with a series of shots of black people staring directly into the camera as if standing their ground, presenting the white “you” with visual evidence of themselves. The emotions that surface across their faces range from heartbreak to rage to steely self-assurance. It’s an unbearably fraught moment, one in which the subjects seek to convey their autonomy and humanity, but one whose dynamics are invariably governed by the question of how to prove the depth of one’s emotions to the historically unfeeling white onlooker. And yet it’s in the imagining of what it would mean for each of these gazes to be returned that the echoes of Baldwin’s words finally take on their devastating cinematic force.

Closer Look: I Am Not Your Negro opens on February 3.

Andrew Chan has been contributing to Film Comment since 2008.

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