Film Review: I Am Not Your Negro
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” This lesser known quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. made its way around the liberal side of social media this MLK Day. “I Am Not Your Negro” (dir. Raoul Peck), serves among other things as a call to action to King’s ‘white moderates’.
The film drapes James Baldwin’s words loosely on a narrative structure of his reaction to the lives and deaths of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Eschewing talking heads, Peck uses archival footage from popular culture and from Baldwin’s public appearances; as well as Baldwin’s prose, read by Samuel L. Jackson in voiceover. Baldwin, who was a preacher between the ages of 14 and 17, is a compelling presence and conveys an urgent thoughtfulness when he speaks. In one clip, from an appearance on the Dick Cavett Show, he says “I don’t know what most white people in this country feel. I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions.”
All Americans are complicit in a racist society. What matters, the film suggests, are our actions and even more their results. In one instance, over a montage of scenes from white movies and footage of violence against black people, a Baldwin quote from his speech ‘The White Problem’ describes Gary Cooper and Doris Day as, “the most grotesque appeals to innocence the world has ever seen.” There is a cut to the exuberant ‘Once a Year Day’ scene from ‘The Pajama Game’. To see a movie I recalled fondly from childhood characterized as sinister was a jarring reminder that a great deal of our self image as a society is tied up not in explicit racism, but in a negligent naivete that has the same outcome. Baldwin, in that same appearance on the Dick Cavett Show: “I don’t know if the real estate lobby has anything against black people, but I know the real estate lobby is keeping me in the ghetto. I don’t know if the Board of Education hates black people but I know the textbooks they give my children to read and the schools we have to go to. This is the evidence.”
Though it is tempting in — shudder — Trump’s America to say that “I Am Not Your Negro” is particularly relevant today, there is no point in our history that James Baldwin’s words have not been relevant. What they are now is potent. In a post-Trump country, where the KKK endorses the president and it is impossible to pretend that racism is a thing of the past, this film offers an admonition that it isn’t enough to mean well. The effects of racism and the shared culture which institutionalizes it must be challenged.
