I Am Not Your Negro

There are so many ways to feel and experience and comment on this film.

AS A WRITER: For lovers of language, phrasing, and meaning, hearing James Baldwin's writings and seeing him speak is enough to spark the highest praise alone. His capacity for observational conclusion and his use of language to transmit these conclusions is extraordinary. In this, he is one of the finest chroniclers of the American condition, not just one of the finest African American chroniclers. If you don't believe that going into this movie, you will when you come out of it. Spending close to two hours listening to the man's work is an utterly intoxicating experience. In this regard the film is extraordinary.

AS A FILM LOVER: We know that James Baldwin was a cinephile and one of the great film critics in American history. He wrote extensively about cinema and a large part of this film consists of clips from Hollywood's rough history of reducing or falsifying the black American experience, often with Baldwin's own criticisms laid on top of them, weighing the clips down, eviscerating them. There are hard juxtapositions here as well, such as the innocence of Doris Day pressed up against the reality of lynched black men and women swaying in trees. By contextualizing these images in new and fresh ways the film is able to paint an impressionistic portrait of American denial. And despite a small handful of shots that don't entirely synergistically ring with the Baldwin text (I'm thinking of a few clips – by no means all - that the filmmaker himself shot), there are enough times when the words being spoken and the images being shown are so surprising and spot on as to be true, high, art. In this regard, the film is extraordinary.

AS A HUMAN BEING: The greatest moral failing of this nation is not its imperialism, not its militarism, not its materialism or escapism or consumerism, – though the film makes a strong case that all these things are tangled together – America's greatest moral failing is its racism. And the scalpel procession with which this movie uses Baldwin's words and character to autopsy this vast cultural sin is inspiring. Baldwin himself was never a racist, though God knows, I wouldn't blame him if he had been. Baldwin was never a classist or a nationalist or a demagogue of any sort. Baldwin was a man. He demanded that he be perceived as a man and that black America be perceived as people, with all the dignity and rights that affords. He looked America in the eye and asked a simple question, why do you NEED to dehumanize me? And he followed the question up with a statement, as long as you dehumanize me, America can never succeed. It was not a threat. It was another of his observational truths, the idea that our racism undoes us, keeps us from being great. In the way "I'm Not Your Negro" illuminates Baldwin's call for a higher humanist agenda, the film is extraordinary.

AS AN ACTIVIST: The film implies that the most horrifying thing you can do to a movement is to kill its leaders. Not just because you deny dignity and rights to the people who look to those leaders for hope, but you also impact the movement for generations. The natural order of generational transition, that a great leader will grow old, evolve, change, and teach the next generation how to lead, is violently interrupted. What we are left with is the idea that there is nothing Malcolm X or Martin Luther King could have done to keep from being killed except to be silent – not an option for either, nor for Baldwin. X was killed even as he was becoming less militant, less radical, reversing against the idea of "the white devil". This "evolution" did not save him. King was killed even as he was becoming more radicalized, more desperate, slowly walking back the rule of love for the rule of forced respect. This "evolution" did not save him. There was nothing the White America that killed them wanted from them but silence in the face of dehumanization. And in its subtle, artistic, nuanced way, this film is about all of that. But it also ties itself to the moment. Images of Ferguson, photographs of unarmed black children left dead in the streets by police, video of Rodney King being brutalized beyond any justification, all of it means that Baldwin's words ring timeless, his call to action not remotely diffused by our distance from him and his time. In this regard, the film is extraordinary.

AS A LOVER OF PEOPLE: Baldwin is by no means a traditionally handsome man, but he is a striking one. His charisma is nuclear and his face is always animated. When he speaks, the depth and warmth of the content play across his features. His eyebrows lift all the way to the middle of his forehead when he pauses to gather his considerable intellect for attack. His eyes turn down and to the right when he knows he's eviscerating an illegitimate institution. He punctuates an observation with a smile so genuine and wide that it emits its own light. To watch him command a talk show or a lecture is cinema enough. In that it gives us the gift of watching Baldwin speak – among so many other things - the film is extraordinary.

I guess I have some small aesthetic qualms with the way the film is put together, but to what end? These are my own little opinions about the tiniest minutia of filmmaking. Personal hang- ups on a certain cut here or there, useless criticisms on a work that succeeds so profoundly in all the most valuable and important ways.

The film is extraordinary, important, and genuine in any and every way that matters, and that's all there is to it.

A laudable effort that attempts to break down what it means to be born black in the United States of America, I Am Not Your Negro works both as an informative piece that chronicles the nation's disgraceful history and an evocative memoir that tries to piece together and envision the contents of James Baldwin's unfinished manuscript.

Directed by Raoul Peck, this documentary takes us through Baldwin's own personal observations of American race relations and how by refusing to take responsibility & confront its blood-soaked history, the country remains incapable of real foundational change. The parallel it draws between then & now is quite unnerving, for America is still inherently racist, more or less.

Through the words & voice of James Baldwin, it underlines how the western nations have been living a lie of pretended humanism and continue to be wilfully ignorant of their criminal ancestry. There's a soothing, almost assuring touch to Baldwin's voice and it helps keep the viewers' rage in check whenever explicit images of violence & brutality endured by the African-American population surfaces on screen.

Overall, I Am Not Your Negro offers a bold, honest & unsparing exposé of the dark side of America, far from the sense of reality it advertises to the world, and argues that the onus lies with their white demographic to face the uncomfortable truth and dismantle the systemic racism, for the future of America is very much synonymous with the future of its black community. Although this documentary is a bit uneven at times, it is nonetheless vital viewing.

This documentary tells the story of the horrible history of the United States of America just decades ago, when the law and the public openly allowed horrifying discrimination based on race. Three individuals who spoke out against this terrible and sustained crime against equality were murdered. This documentary focuses on these three brave souls who met their untimely death.

It is almost out of this world to see how discrimination and abuse happened as if it was normal. The archival footage are plentiful and very well selected in this documentary. What people said in front of camera in support of discrimination was horrific. I could not believe there was even someone singing about the murder of the African American activist.

This documentary captivates my attention and evokes my emotions.

This film should be required for every American. It is one of the most important films of our time. It is lyrical, profound, historic and of this moment. And, at the same time it is profoundly intimate. James Baldwin is right here with us, front and center, looking right at us, talking with us, imploring us to consider the urgent questions he raised 50 years ago that are as urgent today. Thank you Raoul Peck. This is a masterpiece. It is as poetic as it is a demand for white people to come to terms with how they have constructed blackness and what, indeed, this means about whiteness. Peck includes one of Baldwin's most famous statements on this in the film: "What white people have to do, is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a n*#!er in the first place. Because I'm not a n*#!er. I'm a man, but if you think I'm a n*#!er, it means you need it. . . . If I'm not a n*#!er here and you invented him — you, the white people, invented him — then you've got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that. Whether or not it's able to ask that question." This is it. Our future depends on it. Baldwin cannot say it more clearly.

James Baldwin began a book called "Remember This House" but died before completing it. It intended to weave together the stories of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers into a tapestry of the black American experience. In "I Am Not Your Negro," Samuel L. Jackson reads the finished portion of the manuscript, and filmmaker Raoul Peck sets the words to images from the Civil Rights Movement and the current Black Lives Matter movement. The result is a bracing and deservedly angry film that captures better than anything I've read or seen yet the reasons behind the frustration and outrage of American blacks.

There's a marvelous moment in the film when a philosophy professor challenges Baldwin on the Dick Cavett Show for his attitudes, and basically holds Baldwin (and by extension black people) responsible for the continuing racial divide. His message seems to be "you're the one making an issue out of this, not me." Baldwin's take down of him in eloquent words that I won't even begin to try to replicate captures the essence of the entire film and the black struggle for equality.

And Baldwin's criticism doesn't stop at racial issues. He also denounces American popular and material culture in general, accusing Americans of letting consumerism anesthetize them into a false sense of happiness and contentment that allows them to ignore all that is wrong with the American way of life.

This is a movie that made me furious at America for continuing to stick its head up its ass when it comes to the subject of race. Watching Baldwin's heartfelt distress over the Civil Rights Movement juxtaposed to recent images from the news made it crystal clear that America has not progressed as much as it would like to think it has.

Grade: A