Review: I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO Is A Bold And Searing Decoding of America's Racial Divide

James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, The Fire Next Time) spoke truths about the racial divide in America with an economy of language, a piercing intensity, an indisputable authority, and an authenticity that is sorely absent in today's discussions.

Thanks to Raoul Peck, that gap has been filled by one of the most important documentaries of our time, I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO. Important because it resurrects the candid perspectives of a true witness to the historic forces that undergird and define racism. Important because, if you listen closely and carefully to Baldwin's analyses, you begin to decode the symbols and practices that feed bigotry. Important because if you're a visual learner, you cannot help but be moved and informed by the juxtaposition of images of two worlds, made different by conscious and unconscious systemic segregation. Important, finally, because if we are ever to have a serious and productive national conversation about race in America, Baldwin asks profoundly fundamental and intrinsically uncomfortable questions that beg to be answered.

Peck has managed to fulfill these various layers of importance in the course of a stunning 95 minute documentary that seamlessly integrates segments of Baldwin's oracular speeches and interviews (especially the 1968 conversation with Dick Cavett) with clips from strategically selected Hollywood movies and TV commercials, and disquieting footage of street riots, police brutality, lynchings, and funeral processions of the famous and not so famous.

The film tees off of a beginning manuscript (1979) by Baldwin that was to be titled Remember This House and which, according to a letter he wrote to his literary agent, would tell the story of America through the lenses of the lives of his friends, Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X. Baldwin died without finishing the book; Peck has picked up where he left off, recruiting the voice of Samuel L. Jackson to speak Baldwin's narration.

Peck wastes no time in cutting to the chase in a documentary that retains from beginning to end a sharp dramatic edge. Cut to Dick Cavett's interview with Baldwin who is asked why the Negro wasn't feeling more optimistic when things seemed to be getting better, given, for example, increased visibility in TV commercials, politics, and sports. Cavett asks ~ it seems incredibly naïve today ~ if the situation may at once be getting better and yet still seems hopeless. Baldwin majestically reframes the issue and says that "it is not a question of what happens to Negroes here, the real question is what happens to our country."

With chapters entitled Paying My Dues, Heroes, Witness, Purity, Selling the Negro, and I Am Not A Nigger, Baldwin's narrative progresses from his return to the U.S. from France to his testimonies about the travails of blacks in America and the deep disconnects within our culture. He recounts the agony that attended the killings of Martin, Malcolm, and Medgar. He is terrified by the moral apathy and ignorance of Americans regarding the black experience; certain of the price to be paid for this apathy and the segregation of the races; skeptical of the superficial efforts of the media and established institutions to gloss over root causes; and convinced that the issues of race will not be resolved until America has reconciled itself to the situation it created.

Baldwin laments that the country doesn't know what to do with its Black population. "When you try to stand up and look the world in the face like you have a right to be here, you attack the entire structure of the Western world."

I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO is a searing and provocative chronicle of America as seen through Baldwin's eyes. What he understood historically and what he witnessed in the '60's and '70's (the cruelty and rage directed at black children and seminal heroes; the internal contradictions of a society that, in its fixation with material goods, is intrinsically unhappy and compensates for that unhappiness by inflicting its pain on the "outsider") is amplified in documentary detail that draws a clear line of continuity and relevance to the fires that burn today.

To understand racism in America is to see America through James Baldwin's eyes.

I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for the 89th Academy Awards. It is one of the select presentations at this year's Sedona International Film Festival, which runs from February 18th through the 26th.

Photo credit to Bob Adelman (RIP)

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