I Am Not Your Negro - A Review

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Nominated for a 2017 Oscar
… because of the bad niggers we were.

And we know that, for the perpetuation of this system, we have all been mercilessly brutalized, and have been told nothing but lies, lies about ourselves and our kinsmen and our past, and about love, life, and death, so that both soul and body have been bound in hell.

It is the innocence that constitutes the crime.

I can’t be a pessimist because I’am alive. — James Baldwin

Imagine you are the articulate and incisive James Baldwin and three of your friends happen to be Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, and Malcom X, and all three of them are killed. You leave behind some revelatory notes about this “peculiar” situation… which remain untouched for forty years.

Imagine now that you are the talented and engaged Haitian filmmaker, Raoul Peck*, and you are exclusively privy to that writing and you manage to produce your film… independently.

Now, like a torch, it lights up our darkest skies: I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO is that film!

*(Re)view his Lumumba: La mort du prophète (Lumumba: Death of a Prophet) & L’Homme sur les quais (The Man by the Shore)

NOTA BENE
NEEDS TO STOP: the rich getting richer with the price of slavery still unaccounted for & the black community destroyed by poverty and violence & mass incarceration replacing slavery (see the other 2017 Oscar nominated documentary, 13th).

OUTRAGE, whether James Baldwin’s, Black Lives Matter’s, or any old way it chooses to flare up, is unavoidable.

We have been here before TOO MANY TIMES but they would like us to believe that something is “new.”
A black president and a National Museum of African American History in DC have only made the brutality more visible.

Drowning in our own complacency and our distractions, we cannot whitewash history to erase the crimes.
Guilty – because of the innocence.