The late James Baldwin reached out from his grave and bitch-slapped America in “I Am Not Your Negro” by filmmaker Raoul Peck.
In a prophetic stance, James Baldwin’s writings, from an unfinished novel, and voiced by Samuel L. Jackson, is a bone-chilling wake-up call to every single person who calls America home.
He speaks. In 1979, 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 successive assassinations of three of his close friends—Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.”
This book was never completed, and at the time of Baldwin’s death (in 1987) he had only completed 30 pages of the manuscript.
The power of Baldwin’s astute observations could not remain hidden and therefore silent, and under the masterful hands of filmmaker Peck, whose full-bodied vision has more in common with “cinema” than with traditional journalistic documentary-style storytelling, the journey into Black history, which connects the past of the Civil Rights Movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter, is nothing short of miraculous.
Baldwin confronts the deeper connections between the lives and assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. and together, Baldwin and Peck have produced a work that challenges the very definition of what America stands for.
Despite the branding of America, the “home of the brave,” I witnessed what is true about America, and that is it’s the home of “perpetually guilty” and “profoundly ignorant.”
“I Am Not Your Negro” might be one of Baldwin’s best works. Considered to be one of the greatest North-American writers of the second half of the 20th century, he was raised in Harlem, but at the age of 24, he left America for France because the racism in America was intolerable.
Today he is known as a prolific writer and brilliant social critic, and in “I’m Not Your Negro,” his elegant and urging words of warning have proved correct. He was spot on about the destructive trends happening today and yet, in all the ugly layers of truth, he retained a sense of hope and dignity.
His bright and searching mind understood the broad canvas of politics and history, and above all, he understood the human condition, and in understanding it, in all of that, still had hope and a degree of compassion.
“I Am Not Your Negro,” a fast-moving 95 minutes inside Baldwin’s mind, is crafted by Peck, who is best known for the superb perils-of-colonialism drama “Lumumba.”
Here Peck masterfully weaves a collage of public appearances and TV shows, rare glimpses of the tumultuous civil rights era footage alongside clips of Hollywood movies that helped to shape Baldwin’s imagination.
All of this cinematic storytelling is held together by the strength and truth of Baldwin’s words, as voiced by Jackson, and culled from many different sources, including the unfinished manuscript about his assassinated friends—Evers, Malcolm X and King.
BlackLivesMatter and the public execution of unarmed African-American men, women and children in the streets of America by those pledged to “serve and protect,” our police officers, makes the content of the film’s message far greater today. It’s beyond relevant; that word is tame.
He knows that America hates us. Baldwin foresaw all this turmoil. In “I Am Not Your Negro,” he speaks to us, and he tells us why we are despised and why Americans (guilty-guilty-guilty) will never be free of their shame.
Heads up. Listen and hear. America does not have a racial problem. It has, he suggests, a crisis of the American spirit, with race as the excuse.
This cancerous “excuse” if not healed will destroy us all. To hear that message echo through “I Am Not Your Negro” makes me understand just how prophetic a man Baldwin is and why, during his life, he was considered by the FBI to be a very dangerous man.
“I Am Not Your Negro” runs 95 minutes and is in theaters Feb. 3, 2017.