I Am Not Your Negro

I have yet to watch Raoul Peck's I Am Not Your Negro, the critically-acclaimed documentary on James Baldwin released last year, but if the collection of Baldwin's writing that inspired the documentary—captured in the I Am Not Your Negro collection—is any indication, it is a documentary that needs to be seen by everyone.

Reading Baldwin's I Am Not Your Negro was sobering and powerful. After the events of Charlottesville a few weeks ago, when I heard people proclaim “this is not the America I know,” I was reminded of this passage in the book:

White people are astounded by Birmingham.

Black people aren't.

White people are endlessly demanding to be

reassured that Birmingham is really on Mars.

They don't want to believe,

still less to act on the belief,

that what is happening in Birmingham

is happening all over the country.

They don't want to realize that there is not one step,

morally or actually, between

Birmingham and Los Angeles.

I Am Not Your Negro

Most of the white Americans I've ever encountered, really, you know, had a Negro friend or a Negro maid or somebody in high school, but they never, you know, or rarely, after school was over or whatever came into my kitchen, you know. We were segregated from the schoolhouse door. Therefore, he doesn't know, he really does not know, what it was like for me to leave my house, you know, to leave the school and go back to Harlem. He doesn't know how Negroes live. And it comes as a great surprise to the Kennedy brothers and to everybody else in the country. I'm certain, again, you know...that again like most white Americans I have encountered, they have no...I'm sure they have nothing whatever against Negroes, but that's really not the question, you know. The question is really a kind of apathy and ignorance, which is the price we pay for segregation. That's what segregation means. You don't know what's happening on the other side of the wall, because you don't want to know.

Worth repeating:

(originally posted on inthemargins.ca)