I Am Not Your Negro

I Am Not Your Negro, a documentary by Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck, has become one of the favorites to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film at the Oscar party Sunday night. That this will matter much is not clear. Few of us recall the past winners in the category, and a shiny statue is unlikely to compel those otherwise disinclined to see a movie about one of America's last public intellectuals -- a black gay writer who died in 1987.

Or rather a movie largely written by a black gay writer who died in 1987, for Peck's film is less a movie about James Baldwin's later life (it starts as he returns from self-imposed exile in France in 1957) than a collaboration with the author. Specifically, it could be seen as the long deferred completion of Baldwin's abandoned project Remember This House, in which he attempted to present a unified field theory of race in America through an examination of the lives and works of three assassinated black leaders -- Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. -- whom Baldwin had befriended.

I Am Not Your Negro is less about these figures, less about Baldwin, than it is about America, and specifically about the comforting lies we tell ourselves about how we've arrived in the present moment. Perhaps that makes it sound even less inviting.

Yet it is heartening that such movies get made and seen at all, and that they sometimes wind up in theaters in places like Arkansas. This is a challenging film, not the feel-good movie we might want to forget these most interesting times, yet it is precisely the movie we happily ahistoric Americans need.

Peck takes his script from Baldwin's words as preserved in his notes, essays, interviews and letters. Samuel L. Jackson reads some of these words. Others are delivered by Baldwin in archival television footage and old radio broadcasts. It is not so much Baldwin's lyrical language that resonates today as his diagnosis of the American condition. Baldwin held that most of America's endemic and seemingly intractable problems were derived from an almost childlike refusal to confront our country's history.

But, echoing Faulkner, Baldwin insisted history could not be conveniently relegated to "the past."

"History is the present," the film quotes Baldwin as saying. "We carry our history with us. To think otherwise is criminal."

And, Baldwin points out, black Americans have a "great advantage" over their white neighbors in that they have "never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure.

"Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents -- or, anyway, mothers -- know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing."

Certainly some people will reject Baldwin's analysis, insisting instead that their country is a post-racial land where -- as the election of Barack Obama proved -- a black child might aspire to and attain any position. When, in 1965, Robert Kennedy said he saw "no reason" in the "foreseeable future that a Negro could not also be president of the United States," Baldwin had a provocative and surprising response.

"I left America because I doubted my ability to survive the fury of the color problem there," Baldwin wrote in 1961. "I wanted to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or even merely a Negro writer. I wanted to find out in what way the specialness of my experience could be made to connect me with other people instead of dividing me from them."

Fascinating and revelatory, I Am Not Your Negro serves as a vital introduction to one of the most important essayists and a prescient critique of our ongoing condition. It ought to disturb all those who, in Baldwin's words, care exclusively for "their safety and their profits." It ought to cause us all to reconsider the easy habits of thoughtlessness.

MovieStyle on 02/24/2017