I Am Not Your Negro is ostensibly a visual interpretation or adaptation of author James Baldwin’s book proposal, Remember This House, which was about the story of America as told through the stories of three very different men who converged on the road: Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. I Am Not Your Negro uses Baldwin’s proposal to illustrate how Baldwin’s role as a witness in America is timeless as he asks the question, “What is going to happen to this country?” Baldwin claims that he is an optimist, but his assessment is unflinchingly not. I Am Not Your Negro is sadly, timelessly applicable.
Not only should I Am Not Your Negro be required viewing for every American and even perhaps every human being, it is one of the best documentaries that I have ever seen. At this point, I have seen I Am Not Your Negro two times in the theater. I paid the matinee price the first time and full price the second. I would like to see it a third time in the theater. I would like to buy multiple DVDs of I Am Not Your Negro so whenever someone (intentionally or not) asks me a stupid question, I can throw a copy of the movie at them and just say, “Watch this.”
I had to repeatedly watch I Am Not Your Negro because after I watched it the first time, as time passed, I could not separate what I had absorbed as part of daily life in the real world and what were memories from the documentary. I have loved Baldwin since I was a child and the brief glimpse of his friend and fellow moral hero and titan Lorraine Hansberry reminded me of how much I missed them.
I live in a world where people understand the plot twists of Game of Thrones, which I love, but not their own history or even what happened yesterday. It is as if the brain becomes an Etch A Sketch, and it literally cannot retain information from conversation to conversation, day to day. Or maybe the information is a volleyball, and they are vigilantly hitting the ball away from them afraid that life is a game and are afraid of someone else getting a point. I am tired of answering the same questions for the same people while they feel no similar obligation to remember the answers. I have been doing this job for 41 years, and I (think that I) quit on November 11, 2017. Someone else will have to do it, and I Am Not Your Negro can do the job without bearing the psychological scars of and historical responsibility for such encounters. Or maybe they are “moral monsters” who heard everything, but don’t care. Matthew 10:14 says about those who refuse the gospel, “And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.” Only God knows the answer.
I noticed that some reviewers did not like that I Am Not Your Negro used recent news footage to illustrate points that Baldwin made in his proposal. I Am Not Your Negro uses Baldwin’s role as a witness, and the documentary literally shows us the world through Baldwin’s eyes. Baldwin is similar to a witness in Revelation who has escaped his temporal limits and transcended to see the events of his time and mine, which is why I Am Not Your Negro not only uses old clips from the news and old black and white and color photographs from I Am Not Your Negro, but excerpts from movies, color recreations of point of view shots when the proposal recounts a memory from his life and photographs and video footage from today. If his words apply today, then I Am Not Your Negro shows images from today.
I Am Not Your Negro knows that images unconsciously train us to see the world a certain way and horrifically to see ourselves in the way that the world in power sees us. To borrow Baldwin’s terminology, movies and TV shows lie about the world that we know, and I Am Not Your Negro refuses to lie about what is happening. I Am Not Your Negro uses Baldwin’s role as witness to expose the tyranny of the terror of imagination that is literally destroying our country. I Am Not Your Negro uses Baldwin’s words to warn that the treatment of black people as other and not American indicates a sickness and is inextricably linked to the future of this country. Race is simply a canary in a coalmine and indicates a deeper problem of the American soul.
I Am Not Your Negro is a real life horror story because it asks why America needs to create a boogeyman, a nigger, out of someone who isn’t and returns the moral burden of this question back on the shoulders of those who either through their action or inaction constantly choose the swastika, the confederate flag or any other ugly gesture, including erasing or minimizing the problem. See I Am Not Your Negro because love means caring about our history and future. Don’t be a moral monster!