The documentary I Am Not Your Negro centers on the American public intellectual James Baldwin. It’s a searing examination of race in America through Baldwin’s eyes and through his elegant words.
Those words are voiced by Samuel L. Jackson, and there is no third-party “narration”. The spoken words are Baldwin’s, either voiced by Jackson or spoken by Baldwin himself in file footage. Baldwin’s associates Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr. are heard in file footage, but that’s it – the rest is all Baldwin.
The content of those words is about the African-American experience in America and Baldwin’s insistence on understanding and acknowledging the grievance and the moral imperative for remedy. The very last thing that Baldwin cared about was the comfort of his readers and listeners.
I Am Not Your Negro is an important film because Baldwin’s words today, stripped of their relation to temporal events, are stirring as we hear them again, naked and with urgency. Lest we fail to connect the dots to our current situation, snippets of current day events (Obama, Black Lives Matter, etc.) make it clear how relevant Baldwin’s thinking still is today.
The choice to present Baldwin’s thinking through only his own words, unadorned by talking heads is very successful. Director/co-writer Raoul Peck gets the credit for that, and the film that he has constructed with editor Alexandra Strauss is compelling.
It occurred tome that we really don’t have “public intellectuals” (thought leaders who were authors and columnists) as we did before cable television and Internet. Today we must make do with Talking (or Yelling) Heads on cable TV and bloggers (hey, I’m one of those); the current focus is more temporal and focused on instant reaction instead of presenting a coherent body of thought.
But, in the Good Old Days, book and newspaper publishers and network television producers were the gatekeepers of public discourse. Those gatekeepers in Baldwin’s time were older white heterosexual men, and even the well-meaning could not have shared his experiences. Given that, it’s surprising and fortunate that Baldwin’s words were able to become accessible to a wide audience.
Baldwin was living the life of an ex-pat in Paris until he watched the newscast of Charlotte, North Carolina, school integration with a lone African-American girl walking thru agitated and abusive racist mob. That’s what motivated him to return to his country and to try to fix it.