‘I Am Not Your Negro’: Film Charts Nightmares Behind the American Dream

There are many moments in Raoul Peck’s astounding new film I Am Not Your Negro that come off the screen and imbed themselves in your chest.

The film begins with a letter that novelist, essayist, and social critic James Baldwin wrote to his agent, describing an idea for a book about the murders of Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Martin Luther King Jr. The book, with the working title Remember this House, remained unfinished when Baldwin died in 1987.

Peck’s rigorous film is the centrepiece of an extraordinary collection playing in honour of Black History Month at the Vancity Theatre in February.

I Am Not Your Negro comes at a curious point in U.S. history. Cinema has opened up conversations about race in new ways. Films like Denzel Washington’s Fences, Ava DuVernay’s 13TH, Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight and Amma Asante’s United Kingdom each contend with the issue in different ways.

It is tempting to look at all of these films and think, “Well, things are getting better, right?” Certainly, filmmakers and artists of colour are better seen and heard this year.

But even the most cursory glance at the news will disavow the notion that much has improved. Racial hatred is currently enshrined in the Oval Office, nestled like a fat white grub in the very heart of U.S. politics. It is eating away at American ideals and secreting poison. As my mother likes to say, “Why is it always the Nazis?” But she has a point — this evil feels old, and also horribly familiar.

What Peck’s film does with supreme elegance and control is to render anew the horror that is implicit in the systemic and ongoing denial of humanity that is racism. The narrative, located in Baldwin’s impassioned and precise language, disinters oppression and racial hatred. But even more horrifically, it reveals the decidedly brutal rationale behind it. Cold, calculated economics, illustrated in the commerce of slavery, and Baldwin’s resounding condemnation of the integration of power and profit. In his own words: “White is a metaphor for power and that is simply a way of describing the Chase Manhattan Bank.”

The economics of race in the American political climate are given vivid voice in other films. Ava DuVernay’s film 13TH is a sustained and furious polemic on the prison-industrial complex as the latest iteration of slavery.

I Am Not Your Negro is equally blunt but it has the poetry of Baldwin’s language to go far deeper.  

At the centre of the film are the murders of Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Martin Luther King Jr., embedded like stones in a river. The film’s flow of images, composed of archival clips, movies, television shows, advertisement, and news footage, streams around these three events.

History has made these men into something remote and almost ossified. But Malcolm, Medgar, and Martin — remembered in Baldwin’s words — were fathers, husbands, friends, and colleagues. Through his memories of them, the specifics of their faces, height and demeanour, they become real, embodied in all their complexity, complication and nuance. As Baldwin writes, “You forget how young everyone was.” At the age of 26, Martin Luther King took up the burden of remaking the entire social fabric of the nation. All three men died before they had turned 40.

The shock of their murders feels new, the reports of each death coming in different, often mundane fashion — a phone call in a restaurant, or over the radio on a bright and sunny day. The small details locate and pin down this experience so you feel it in your own body, the bright flash of shock, followed by the rolling thunder of ongoing sadness and grief. The tangible, physical quality of pain, of what these deaths meant and still continue to mean, feels strangely new. It is like they just happened.

Here is where Peck’s skill and intelligence as a filmmaker are most clearly drawn. I Am Not Your Negro is a feat of orchestration, joining together the past and the present in a continuum that bridges the 2014 riots in Ferguson to the Watts riots of 1965. YouTube footage showing police shootings of unarmed black men, women and children are laid down beside images of lynchings from a hundred years earlier. The camera pans down from bodies hanging in trees to the crowd of blank white faces, looking at the camera with no compunction or even emotion. This spinning carousel of images is anchored by Baldwin’s words (read here by Samuel L. Jackson). In a voice that sounds a thousand years old, he traces the line of history, blunt and brutal and seemingly unchanged.

In the archival footage, drawn from Baldwin’s many television appearances, interviews and lectures, one sequence leaps out. In 1965, Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. were invited to debate each other in the august setting of Cambridge University Union Hall. The topic asked, “Has the American Dream Been Achieved at the Expense of the American Negro?” It is fascinating to watch the debate in its entirety, from the opening introductions, crisply enunciated by a tuxedo-clad young man, to the audience (largely white) rapt with attention. Baldwin was the first to speak and what he said pertained not only to that particular moment in 1965, but also to this current moment in American history. And, curiously enough, to 95 years earlier when the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, promising blacks the right to vote, was ratified.

In Baldwin’s words: “This is not an overstatement. I picked the cotton and I carried it to market and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip. For nothing. For nothing. The southern oligarchy, which until today has so much power in Washington… was created by my labour and my sweat and the violation of my women and the murder of my children. This in the land of the free, the home of the brave.”

Baldwin was a powerful orator, possessed of the ability to lace words with a near tactile quality so they seemed made anew. You can taste this language, sometimes bitter or sweet, but so freighted with meaning that certain words, like “expense” or “savage,” threaten to break under the burden they carry. Whether he is crooking a finger, carving an idea into the air, or fixing the audience with his heavy-lidded eyes, he possesses a stillness that radiates with emotion, so that the air around him seems to shudder with heat.

What is most remarkable about this debate was not Baldwin’s eloquence, nor even how eerily prescient some of his statements proved, but rather his ability to locate and make tangible and real the disconnect between the myth of the American dream and the reality for the black population.

And then there is the unmistakable note of warning. To deny any group of people their essential humanity has repercussions not just for the victims of oppression but also for the perpetrators.

Baldwin’s own memories, encased in language that bends and twists, with near sinuous ease, locates these ideas in lived experience. He talks about growing up, watching John Wayne movies, and the dawning understanding that as a person of colour, “You are the Indian.” The juxtaposition of images creates a third narrative, one that hangs in the air like smoke. You breathe it in, almost without realizing it. 

It isn’t just Baldwin’s words that get inside you. It is his ability to articulate things that are unspoken, to ascribe a form and content to experience and feeling that you don’t even have a name for. Captured in words, like a glass holds water, you immediately recognize them for what they are. His closing statement in the debate with Buckley rings with near biblical strength that tears away the drapery of narrative and spits out the truth. 

“It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of its population is beneath them. And until that moment, until the moment comes when we, the Americans, we, the American people, are able to accept the fact, that I have to accept, for example, that my ancestors are both white and Black. That on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other and that I am not a ward of America. I am not an object of missionary charity. I am one of the people who built the country — until this moment, there is scarcely any hope for the American dream because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it. And if that happens, it is a very grave moment for the West.”

Baldwin’s moral courage is embedded in the very title of the film. When the film cuts to black-and-white footage of the writer staring flatly at whatever interlocutor is grilling him about race in the U.S., the truth is made bare. It is there in the lines in Baldwin’s face, the weariness in his voice, as he states, unequivocally, that the fate of the nation resides upon its ability to contend openly with its history and responsibility.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”