"i am not your negro"

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"I Am Not Your Negro" is not just a documentary, it is an ode to the late [great] novelist, poet, activist, and cultural auditor James Arthur Baldwin. To say he was a pioneer of the Civil Rights movement alone would be a gross understatement, ignoring both his talents and towering cultural achievements. Baldwin, as a literary philosopher, operated under the dubious suspicion that freedom and inequality operated within the same ugly space in America, to which every Black citizen who lived through Jim Crow-era segregation, the KKK, Southern lynchings, or all of the above, knew all too well. His carefully articulated, methodical manner of speaking is at times, so stirring and disarming it also remains difficult to see why he never became a household name. Mr. Baldwin was not only concerned with the treatment of his beguiled brothers-in-arms, but of the depiction of his Black brethren on screen — whether that encompassed their portrayal as obsequious servants, harbingers of violence, or just plain shut out of the narrative entirely, his woeful cadence always felt bolstered by an underlying, latent distrust of America's grim power structure. 

Baldwin's fears and memories became painfully distilled in the hypocrisies bestowed upon the poorest, marginalized masses. It is as much a raging discontent as it is an exasperation directed at the idea that a human being could over claim ownership over another and live out their lives with a straight face. The film's director, Raoul Peck (also an ex-pat), charts Baldwin's emergence on the national stage by opening with a debate between Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. — a conservative whose snaky brand of crypto-fascism earned him a lifetime pass among the GOP's 21st century pecking order. Matched by an immutable urgency found in Alexei Aigui's jazzy, funereal score, Peck and his narrator (Samuel L. Jackson), transports viewers back to the combustible days of the 1950's and 1960s, when every man, woman, and child, regardless of creed, class, or education, had still not been given the right to vote.

... Let alone be given the opportunity to become President of the United States.

The ominous conclusion to that great chapter of course, would be Trump's inevitable victory in 2016. It is aggravating to see how, in many respects, very little has changed in America over the past six decades. The fiery marches of Selma and Birmingham which recede into our collective unconscious, eerily recall the protests of the Black Lives Matter movements in Ferguson, Baltimore, Dallas and Milwaukee. Baldwin, by all measures, never lets us forget that we are complicit in our nation's blood-stained history. If we cease to continue seeing those around us as people — when we ban our Muslim brothers and sisters from entering the country, or deport our undocumented neighbors, we are consciously removing our shared responsibility to humanity. We must remind ourselves that these individuals are indeed kin, who share the same values, dreams, hopes, and aspirations which all of us embody. It is vital and incumbent to our survival as a species, that we fight against becoming the "moral monsters" of yesterday and tomorrow.

"What does it mean to be black?" Baldwin eventually asks us. "I'm a human being. I'm not black. It's not the criteria that determines whether or not I am a human being." This tumult evidently, is not just borne out of the past, but is very much still alive in the present — lurking, bubbling just beneath the surface. "This is who I am," Baldwin argues. "The problem is you. I know who I am. I know where I belong." Living amidst this invisible yet palpable threat of violence, for Baldwin or anyone else who has ever been pulled over by a cop or given the stink-eye by a convenience store clerk, the idea that one could not and still cannot live freely in the country in which they were born remains a black eye on our nation's history, and very much continues to plague our country's soul. 

"I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO" Rated PG-13. In English. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes.