Nominated for a documentary Oscar, I urge you to see I Am Not Your Negro on the big screen. For it is that rarest of films—one which I want to see with a multi-ethnic, multi-age audience and talk about at the end.
Using the words of novelist, poet and observer James Baldwin, the Haitian born director Raoul Peck has capitalized on his (and his subject’s) “outsider’s” perspective to create a timely, powerful film. We get to know Baldwin from archival footage made during speeches and talk shows, and an unpublished memoir (read by Samuel L. Jackson) that Baldwin wanted to write about his time with three martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement—Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King.
All of us have vivid recollections of where we were and what we were doing when we heard tragic news. Baldwin recalls driving back from a day on a beautiful Puerto Rican beach when he heard about Medgar’s murder on the car radio. His thoughts immediately focused on his friend’s wife and children and the now bloodstained carport next to the house which had always been filled with so much love.
Baldwin was at a family dinner in a London restaurant when the maitre-de-told him he had a phone call. HIs sister rose from the table saying, “I’ll get it,” and returned a few minutes later, sat down and picked at her food. “What’s wrong?” Baldwin asked her. “I didn’t want to share this,” she answered, “Malcolm was shot.. dead.”
Palm Springs was where Baldwin heard of Dr. King’s assassination. Working on a screenplay for a Columbia Pictures movie about Malcolm X, Baldwin envisioned Billy Dee Williams as the film’s star. Williams had been swimming and sunning himself while listening to the radio, and heard a news bulletin about King’s assassination. He shared this with everyone in the yard, and Baldwin remembers crumpling to his knees in utter despair. “I wouldn’t have made it without Billy. He rocked me like a baby and stroked my head while telling me over and over again that it was okay to cry.” Baldwin recalls that at Dr. King’s funeral, his resolution not to shed any tears in public was as “one of the most difficult things I have ever done.”
But it is not the “witness to history” aspect of James Baldwin’s life which captures my attention. Rather, it is his language, and how he uses his pauses and his artist-like hands to animate and emphasize what he is sharing. One example is from a discussion he has with Dick Cavett in 1968 where he points out how perceptions shape our reality and purposefully uses the so-called N-word to do so: “When the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles or the Irish or any White man in the world says ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ the entire White world applauds. But if a Black man says exactly the same thing—word for word, he is judged a criminal, and treated like one, and everything possible is done to make an example of this Bad Nigger so there won’t be anymore like him.”
With the recent sea change in Washington D.C., Baldwin’s reflections on the creation of “The Nigger” are more important than ever:
“Now, here in this country, we’ve got something called a Nigger…
We have invented the Nigger.
I didn’t invent him.
White people invented him.
I’ve always known,
I had to know by the time I was 17 years old,
What you were describing was not me,
And what you were afraid of was not me
It has to be something else,
Something YOU were afraid of – you invested me with.
Now, if that’s so…
No matter what you’ve done to me,
I can say to you this, and I mean
And I know,
And I’ve always known,
And really always- that’s a part of the agony –
I’ve always known that I am not a Nigger.
But if I am not the Nigger,
And if it’s true that your invention reveals you,
Then who is the Nigger?
I’m not the victim here.
I know one thing from another…
I know I was born, I’m gonna suffer, and I’m gonna die.
The only way to get through life is know the worst things about it.
I’ve learned this because I had to learn it.
But, you still think, I gather,
That the Nigger is necessary.
Well, he’s unnecessary to me,
So he must be necessary to you.”
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