Movie of the Week: I Am Not Your Negro

I Am Not Your Negro can be best described as a manifesto for James Baldwin’s revolutionary brand of thought on American constructions of race, racism, and whiteness. Through the prism of archival footage, Baldwin’s own speeches, interviews, letters and essays (brilliantly narrated by Samuel L. Jackson) director Raoul Peck brings to life Baldwin’s blisteringly incisive insight as America’s foremost social critic, together with his cool rage as a black man living in the deep shadow of inequality and injustice.

The film’s chronological sweep is ambitious, taking in everything from the toxic racial stereotyping of early silent films like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to the racialized discourses of booming post-war consumer culture, the brutality of state violence, the Black Lives Matter movement and even the racism hard-wired into the American Western. Throughout Baldwin’s work, cinema in particular and popular culture in general is a consistent target of blistering critical analysis; it is through the films of John Wayne and Doris Day that Baldwin sees the true philosophy of American racism brought to life for mass consumption. As Baldwin’s argues, Hollywood cinema was a site of awakening “It comes as a great shock around the age of 5 or 6 or 7 to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians — when you were rooting for Gary Cooper — that the Indians were you! It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace, and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you."

John Lewis, Hosea Williams and protesters face off hostile local police on the infamous Edmund Petus Bridge. Alabama, 1965

I Am not your Negro was originally inspired by Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, Remember this House, which was intended to be a memoir telling the story of racism in America through the lives of three key figures within Baldwin’s circle of Civil Rights activists, Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. The murders of Baldwin’s friends and the pervasive threat of violence that threaded its way through Baldwin’s own life serves as the emotional anchor of the piece – continually bringing us back to the pain and devastation of institutionalised racism.

Since Baldwin died in 1987 before completing the manuscript, the nature of the work that he intended to create will be forever unknowable. However, what Peck manages to deliver is a searingly confrontational take on the state of race relations in America – as relevant in the present day as in the Civil Rights era.