| Title | : | I Am Not Your Negro |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0525434690 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780525434696 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 144 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2017 |
I Am Not Your Negro Reviews
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The White Man’s Burden
The United States has replaced South Africa as the world’s most racist country. Race, not economic policy, nor neo-liberal ideology, nor the growing gap between the rich and the rest constitute the mastic that holds the Republican tiles to the wall of a George Wallace-revived in the White House.
Of course it’s an error to blame Trump for the condition. He’s a consequence not a cause. America is truly a representative democracy and Trump is an accurate representation of the country, or at least those dominant political activists who are out to revenge the variety of wrongs they believe they have suffered. At a stroke, these Americans have returned their country to the racial conditions of half a century ago.
The situation is in fact more dire than it was in 1968. Then it was a shock to most Americans to find that Los Angeles California was as profoundly racist as Birmingham Alabama. They reacted positively to the revelation of a national injustice. Today they are aware of and by and large don’t care about the continuing conditions of racial injustice. Civil rights, de-segregation, affirmative action didn’t change things much, they think. Black people are still economically disadvantaged, the race-card still wins elections, and young Black men are being incarcerated and executed by the police in record numbers. Race is a political dead issue, unless you’re Black.
And even if you’re Black, race might as well be a dead issue. Back in 1968 the NAACP and CORE had clout. They could target effective disruption of the system by provoking the local red-neck Deplorables to demonstrate their insanity publicly. The media would do the heavy lifting of convincing everyone else that something had to be done. There are no local villains now; or rather there are more than ever but they are dispersed throughout the population. According to the electoral statistics, they are the people who live next door, at least on one side, often on both.
And media ratings aren’t generated by reporting on hidden just causes nowadays. There is nothing to reveal; everyone already knows the score. What matters now is the intensity of conflicting sentiment, no matter what the sentiment - family, freedom, faith, guns, history - but only for a minute, or until the next provocative presidential tweet. Coherent narrative development isn’t possible. In any case, no one is really listening.
Peck is absolutely correct in his introductory judgment: “Baldwin knew how to deconstruct stories and put them back in their fundamental right order and context.” The problem is that the intellectual environment into which Baldwin now speaks is just about at the level of the red-necks of Birmingham in 1968. Their religious cant, self-interested rationalisation and sheer bloody-mindedness have spread virulently through church-networks, Republican Party caucuses, and pseudo-intellectual rants like that of Thomas Sowell. Intelligent insight means about as much to these people as the weather in Central Asia.
Peck provides a good summary of Baldwin’s view when he quotes him: “I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human. And I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become in themselves moral monsters.” Unlike Malcolm X, Baldwin thought the monsters could be converted. Unlike Martin King, he thought he could contribute to their conversion by intelligent writing rather than direct action or assertive politics.
Baldwin was apparently wrong about the potential for America on both counts. The country is composed largely of moral monsters and it turns out that it isn’t possible to tame them through civil action or politics. Baldwin was not naive about the risk he took on America when he returned to the country from Paris. He realised that the entire country could actually be mad. He was clear that “a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac.” The country continues to rave with just this maniacal image in the person of DJT. Neither political action nor intellectual argument has had any lasting effect on the majority of Black lives, which de facto do not matter in most of America.
Baldwin identifies the source of the problem explicitly. The issue, he always contended, has nothing to do with race in the first instance. As young as aged ten, he says, “I begin to suspect that white people did not act as they did because they were white, but for some other reason.” Eventually he began to understand the white man’s feeling of inadequacy, specifically his fear of impurity. “This problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them,” Baldwin says.
This is of course a profound observation about what might be called the deep psychic structure of the entire country. But it would be a mistake to think that Baldwin is making a veiled allusion to race, black as impure white for example, a sort of disguised inverted racism. Peck’s quotation shows Baldwin on the very verge of making the connection to America’s history and heritage: “... no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life. This failure of the private life has always had the most devastating effect on American public conduct, and on black-white relations. If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have become so dependent on what they call “the Negro problem.” The problem, in other words, is in the white psyche, and it would exist without any Black population at all.
If Baldwin is correct, and I think he is, it is clear that American racism is an incidental by-product of another issue. The Black man is not so much a scapegoat as collateral damage, a permanent reminder of just how impure the white man has been in his conquest of the continent. The white man may forgive himself publicly by pointing out that Black slavery is an African invention, initially imposed on Africans by Africans. But privately he knows his guilt, which is passed from generation to generation by its suppression. How, and more importantly why, does he do this? And what is the connection with his fear of impurity?
As far as I am aware, Baldwin doesn’t anywhere develop his theory of white fear of impurity in any detail. But I think the obvious and most plausible source of this fear is the peculiar form of religion which appeared with the first permanent European settlements in North America. This was a militant form of Calvinism, which although tempered somewhat over the centuries, provided a common ethos of duty, work, and solidarity. The elements of this ethos pervade even the more atheistic contemporary American society. And this ethos is built on a very clear contradiction which leads precisely to the conflict between public and private life that Baldwin suggests.
The core of the problem is well known to theologians: Christian doubt. Doubt about one’s worth and spiritual fate is an emotionally powerful phenomenon. Luther after all began the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation based on just this doubt. Such doubt is common among Christians who are required as such to enthusiastically accept a range of views that is less than intuitively or rationally obvious. But it is acutely relevant among the Protestants who emphasise absolute divine power and direct divine communication with believers.
On the one hand, it is a fundamental doctrine in all Christian sects that one must not presume on the mercy of God. His reasons are not human reasons and he has already made up his mind about who will eternally flourish based on his own inscrutable and unquestionable criteria. Consequently private doubt about whether one has already been numbered among the sheep or the goats is inescapable. Anyone who takes this doctrine seriously is meant to worry. Permanent, insistent concern about one’s fate is in itself a psychosis; but the problem doesn’t end there.
On the other hand, the public attestation of absolute confidence in one’s fate as well as one’s faith is also essential. Any expression of doubt reduces the bonds of solidarity with the rest of the Christian community. Believers are required to toe the party line as a necessary if insufficient condition for inclusion in The Remnant. In secular terms this translates into a permanent public optimism, a positive inspired and inspiring attitude of can-do, and action to protect the tenets of belief. This kind of whistling in the spiritual dark can only magnify the psychotic tendency by repressing its expression.
The result is a pervasive spiritual schizophrenia, even among the non-religious. This manifests itself in the continuous clash of the private and public self. The private self has no firm footing; it is known to be incurably evil. Baldwin gets this: “The root of the white man’s hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror.” Yet the public self must adopt a persona of confident success, of already achieved salvation. One’s life is therefore a profound existential lie. But this cannot be admitted, even to oneself. Hence the evangelical ability to simply not hear Trump’s more or less constant mendacity, or to ignore his ill-considered rants as merely public show.
The public/private compartmentalisation is applied widely to accommodate the most self-serving opinions of believers, both political and religious. So Bill Clinton can be considered unfit as President because he is an adulterer. Yet DJT, despite serial adultery and various other crimes as well as sins, is an exemplary President because he is probably part of God’s plan. In any case we don’t know what’s really in his heart; that’s a private matter.
Any perceived challenge to the public/private spiritual order of things, justified or not, will provoke an aberrant response. Race, actually any distinction will do, is sufficient to identify ‘not us’, those who may not play the public/private game. They threaten to make the distinction visible - indeed just as Baldwin has done - which really does start to unravel the basic fabric of American society. I think Baldwin had an intuitive sense of the distinction and it’s consequences through his early church background. He saw it in the implicit Gnosticism of Black Christian congregations and he extrapolated what he saw (See:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).
So Baldwin’s diagnosis seems to be playing out as he scripted it. “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history,” Baldwin says. The moral monsters have not been tamed but inflamed by the legal and cultural activities of the last half-century of history. And, given the continued appeal of Christianity in America, the prospects for successfully addressing the psychic condition that exists seem rather dim.
Baldwin never committed himself completely to either the radical revolution of Malcolm X or the political struggle of Martin King. Perhaps this wasn’t prudence. Possibly he, like me, was more angry and confused when confronted by the American Tragedy than he let on. -
I started and finished this book on the same day. The book is basically the script of the documentary which I watched a few months. I would recommend watching it first before reading it. There are clips of films in the documentary that do not translate well in the book but Baldwin's words are still powerful reading them on the page. The book also includes introductions by Raoul Peck, the director/editor, about how he created this project.
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This book is a companion to Raoul Peck's documentary I Am Not Your Negro, that being said, this book won't make a lick of sense, if you haven't watched the motion picture yet! So please do that. It is absolutely fantastic. The documentary is fully based on writings by James Baldwin and interviews that he and other Civil Rights activists did back in the 1950/60s. It shows in a brutually honest way the terror of racial segregation and institutionalized racism in the United States, whilst also showing the individual struggle of black citizens in a very emotional way.
There are days – this is one them – when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it. How precisely are you going to reconcile yourself to your situation here and how are you going to communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here. I'm terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don't think I'm human. And I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become in themselves moral monsters.
In June 1979 Baldwin commited to a complex endeavor: to tell his story of America through the lives of three of his murdered friends: Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Baldwin never got past his thirty pages of notes, entitled: Remember This House. The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story.It is entirely up to the American people whether or not they are going to face and deal with and embrace this stranger who they have maligned so long. What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I'm not a nigger, I'm a man. […] If I'm not the nigger here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you've got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that quesiton.
Raoul Peck took it upon himself to turn these notes into a documentary. Baldwin was one of the few authors he could call his own, because Baldwin spoke of a world Raoul knew, a world in which he was not just a footnote or a third-rate character. He knows that the dominant story is not necessarily the true story. And so when we're talking about the Civil Rights movement and what it was like to be black in America in the 20th century, maybe we should start listening to black people, and ditch all of the popular white narratives.Heroes, as far as I could see, were white, and not merely because of the movies but because of the land in which I lived, of which movies were simply a reflection. […] (talking about Western films and the slaughter of indigenous peopel) I suspect that all these stories are designed to reassure us that no crime was committed. We've made a legend out of a massacre.
I have never watched a documentary that hit so close to home. I basically cried throughout the whole thing. I read a lot about Civil Rights in the past months, and so I knew all of these people that Baldwin was referring to, all of these ideas that were prevalent at the time, but to see the actual pictures and videos made it a lot more horrifying, a lot more real. Seeing all of these white students holding up signs that read "We won't go to school with Negroes", or hearing the head of the White Citizens Council saying: "The moment a Negro child walks into the school, every decent, self-respecting, loving parent should take his white child out of that broken school." Wow. I have no words.
And therefore the story of fifteen-year-old Dorothy Counts hit closest to home. She was one of the first black students admitted to the Harry Harding High School. As she made her way to the school she was harrassed and humiliated, spat upon by the mob. (All of which was recorded, the footage is in this documentary.) When Baldwin, still being in Paris at the time, heard of that, it made him furious, and it made him ashamed. He writes that some of them should have been there with her. And on that bright afternoon he knew that he was leaving France, he had to come home.
He goes through his childhood and the struggles that he faced: "It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity has not in its whole system of reality evovled any place for you."
We learn about how he first met Malcolm. How scared he was of him. But Baldwin soon discoverd the line which seperates a witness from an actor. Baldwin did not have to deal with the criminal state of Missisippi, hour by hour and day by day, to say nothing of night after night. He did not have to sweat cold sweat after decisions involving hundreds and thousands of lives. He was not responsible for raising money, for deciding how to use it. He was not responsible for strategy controlling prayer meetings, marches, petitions, voting registration drives. He saw the sheriffs, the deputies, the storm troopers mroe or less in passing. He was never in town to stay. This was sometimes hard on his morale, but he had to accept as time wore on, that part of his responsibility – as a witness – was to move as largely and freely as possible, to write the story, and to get it out.
We learn about the tension between Martin and Malcolm. Martin was only twenty-six in 1955. Twenty-six. Only five years older than me, and he took upon his shoulders the weight of the crimes, and the lies and the hope of a nation. He believed in the principles of nonviolence, and thus the willingness to be the recipient of violence, while never inflicting violence on another. Malcolm disagreed. He didn't want to keep blacks defenseless in the face of attacks.
By the time each died, however, their positions had become virtually the same.It can be said, indeed, that Martin picked up Malcolm's burden, articulated the vision which Malcolm had begun to see, and for which he paid with his life. And that Malcolm was one of the people Martin saw on the mountaintop.
Baldwin was older than Medgar, Malcolm, and Martin. He was raised to believe the eldest was suppposed to be a model for the younger and was, of course, expected to die first.
Not one of these three lived to be forty.
Baldwin also sketches the famous Bobby Kennedy meeting. And I was living for it. Lorraine Hansberry is a fucking savage, and the first thing I did, after learning that she fucking walked out on the Attorney General and wouldn't take any of his bullshit, was picking up her critically acclaimed play A Raisin in the Sun.(Baldwin's Nigger, 1969) But what one does realize is that when you try to stand up and look the world in the face like you had a right to be here, you have attacked the entire power structure of the Western world. […] It is not a racial problem. It is a problem of whether or not you're willing to look at your life and be responsible for it, and then begin to change it.
Round of fucking applause. Whenever people tell me that, let's say, Michael Brown was shot because he was black, I can do nothing but shake my head in desperation. Michael Brown wasn't shot because he was black. He was shot because a white police officer felt threatened by his mere existence.
White people invented the "racial problem" in order to safeguard their own purity. And therefore the root of the white man's hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind. Because if you take the "nigger" away from him, he has nothing left.
Baldwin covers a lot in this documentary: He talks about how black artists weren't allowed to be sex symbols at the time, how the black man was robbed of his masculinity, because it was safer for a girl to walk the streets alone than with a black companion.
We get to see the Cambridge University Debate (1965) in which Baldwin discussed Bobby Kennedy's statement that "there is no reason that in the near and foreseeable future a Negro could also be the president of the United States." That sounds like a very emancipated statement, I suppose, to white people. From the point of view of the [black] man in the Harlem barbershop, Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday and now he's already on his way to the presidency. We've been here for four hundred years and now he tells us that maybe in forty years, if you're good, we may let you become president.
I loved how he stressed that only due to black slaves the economy, especially of the Southern states, could strive. He is of one of the people who built this motherfucking country.There is scarcely any hope for the American dream, because people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it.
I have never seen James Baldwin angry. In all the interviews I watched prior to watching I Am Not Your Negro he was very collected and calm. But the stupid statements by Paul Weiss, which he had to suffer through whilst being on The Dick Cavett Show in 1968 were the last straw. I have never heard Baldwin raise his voice like that. I was so proud:
And I can't say it's a Christian nation, that your brothers will never do that to you, because the record is too long and too bloody. That's all we have done. All your buried corpses now begin to speak.James Baldwin: I'll tell you this: when I left this country in 1948, I left this country for one reason only, one reason – I didn't care where I went. […] I ended up in Paris, on the streets of Paris, with forty dollars in my pocket on the theory that nothing worse could happen to me there than had already happened to me here. You talk about making it as a writer by yourself, you have to be able then to turn off all the antennae with which you live, because once you turn your back on this society you may die. You may die. And it's very hard to sit at a typewriter and concentrate on that if you are afraid of the world around you. The years I lived in Paris did one thing for me: they released me from that particular social terror, which was not the paranoia of my own mind, but a real social danger visible in the face of every cop, every boss, everbody.
Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
Paul Weiss: Not all...
James Baldwin: I don't know what most white people in this country feel. But I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions. […] I don't know if the board of education hates black people, but I know the textbooks they give my children to read and the schools we have to go to. Now, this is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my wife, my woman, my sister, my children on some idealism which you assure me exists in America, which I have never seen.
Thank you, James. -
I read this after watching the documentary. I am not your negro that’s based on an unpublished incomplete work by James Baldwin.
Baldwin wanted to write about the lives of three black leaders of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Medgar Evans. Three friends of him. Three assassinated friends of him.
He only wrote 30 pages of notes.
So Raoul Peck, a filmmaker with the help of James estate used those notes with other published works and words and clips from Baldwin’s various tv interview and debates and produced this documentary.
The black struggle has different aspects and different point of views within it and in the general society.
The book shows how Baldwin wanted to be a man how to be a human how to live and not be worried about fears and what will happen next. He shows how pop culture then was and still whitewashed and never gave anyone anything except what the man or the gov or the controller wants the society to know.
Everyone should watch the documentary
Everyone should read the book -
This is the screenplay produced by Raoul Peck, director of the documentary entitled I Am Not Your Negro. I'd give the documentary 5+ stars; it was a veritable tour de force based on extracts from Baldwin's unfinished book which tells the story of three important men in the history of the black movement, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr, and Malcolm X. The documentary was mesmerising, brutal, clever, touching, incredibly well-shot, I'd recommend to everyone without hesitation, in fact I think everyone should see it. I've dropped one star from the book, though, because it doesn't have the multi-layered strength of the film. I'd recommend to people who would like to check details after watching the documentary or to those who would like to know more on Peck's journey in making the film.
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"Η ιστορία του νεγρου στην Αμερική είναι η ιστορία της ίδιας της Αμερικής. Και δεν είναι μια ωραία ιστορία."
Γροθιά στο στομάχι το συγκεκριμένο βιβλίο και επίκαιρο όσο ποτέ! -
Hopefully you've seen the incredible documentary I Am Not Your Negro. This book tie-in is a transcript of all of the audio from the film, along with still photos and some introductory material by the filmmakers. By far the most powerful thing about the documentary, and by extension this book, is Baldwin's own words, taken from his talks, talk-show appearances and TV debates, and never-before-seen notes from the book he was working on before his death, a joint biography of and meditation on Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. Baldwin has no equal in our culture and if you aren't familiar with him, I definitely recommend you check out the documentary as an introduction. The film gets five stars from me; this book version doesn't show off Baldwin's compelling charisma, but since it's the same content it also deserves five stars.
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Garden Club Woman: My Mexican didn’t come today…
People actually say things like that, which is why James Baldwin had to remind them that he was not “their” Negro.
I enjoyed this book, but it is not the one that I really wish to read. I will find the James Baldwin one that I want, but it may take some time. This book was just filled with his quotes, which were all good, but I wanted more.
As to the above quote, I heard a woman say this, and I was dumbfounded. Afterwards I wondered if I could have said to her, “Where can I get MY own Mexican, because I want to own one, too.” But who knows how that would have went over? It may have just gone over her head. -
Powerful. Someone said on Twitter 1960's James Baldwin makes the argument we're still having 2017, and that's all I can think of in terms of this book.
"It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you."
"Black people have been robbed
of everything in this country,
and they don't want to be robbed of their artists."
My book is covered in highlighted marker. I need to see the documentary ASAP. -
This book is basically the notes, essays, letters etc etc that James Baldwin had planned to pull together for his book 'Remember this House' which remained unfinished at the time of his death.
These notes where then pulled together by Raoul Peck and resulted in the I Am Not Your Negro documentary.
It's a very quick read, for me I would prefer to watch the documentary, and I will do, however it did slightly build upon the Martin Luther King / Malcom X book that I read last year so it was worthwhile. -
Labai rekomenduoju dokumentinį filmą tuo pačiu pavadinimu, kurio teksto santrauka su fotografijomis ir yra ši nedidukė knygutė.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNUYd...
'The story of Negro in America
is the story of America.
It is not a pretty story.'
'I was not responsible for raising money,
for deciding how to use it.
I was not responsible for strategy controlling
prayer meetings, marches, petitions,
voting registration drives.
I saw the sheriffs, the deputies, the storm troopers
more or less in passing.
I was never in town to stay.
This was sometimes hard on my morale,
but I had to accept, as time wore on,
that part of my responsibility - as a witness -
was to move as largely and as freely as possible,
to write the story, and get it out.'
...'If I'm not the nigger here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you've got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.' -
Από τότε που βγήκε το ομώνυμο ντοκιμαντέρ του Ραούλ Πεκ, το 2017 δηλαδή, το βλέπω μια φορά το χρόνο. Το βιβλίο, το οποίο αποτελείται από γραπτά, συνεντεύξεις κλπ. του συγγραφέα Τζέιμς Μπόλντουιν, κυκλοφόρησε τον Νοέμβρη στη χώρα μας και ήδη το διαβάζω για δεύτερη φορά.
Βλέποντας τις δολοφονίες των Μέντγκαρ Έβερς, Μάλκολμ Χ και Μάρτιν Λούθερ Κινγκ (και του Τζορτζ Φλόιντ πλέον) συνει��ητοποιείς ότι ΚΑΙ ο ρατσισμός και οι φυλετικές διακρίσεις αποτελούν εγγενές χαρακτηριστικό του συστήματος. Σε κάθε χώρα, όχι μόνο στην Αμερική. Εκεί όμως η κατάσταση είναι διαχρονικά πιο οξυμένη.
Μεταξύ πολλών, κρατάω αυτό:
Οι λευκοί πρέπει να προσπαθήσουν να βρουν μες στην καρδιά τους τον λόγο που τους ήταν εξαρχής απαραίτητο να έχουν έναν ‘αράπη’, γιατί δεν είμαι ‘αράπης’, είμαι άνθρωπος. Αν όμως εσείς με θεωρείτε αράπη, αυτό σημαίνει πως έχετε ανάγκη τους αράπηδες. -
I heard about the movie, but had no idea there was a companion book to it.
"In his final years, Baldwin had envisioned a book about his three assassinated friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. His deeply personal notes for the project have never been published before. Peck’s film uses them to jump through time, juxtaposing Baldwin’s private words with his public statements, in a blazing examination of the tragic history of race in America."
The writing, essays, the photos that were used are powerful and makes one want to hang your head down and wonder when will we get to that mountaintop where all men and women are seen as equal no matter the color of their skin? We have a US President and conservative based Congress that think racism is okay. They think if they are not calling black people, those who worship differently than them a slur that it's okay. It's like watching everything slowly grind to a halt and you want everyone to just wake up. Call a thing the name that it is. It's racism. We have ignored it for too long and we don't seem to care to change.
Baldwin's writing is electrifying. It gets in your blood and in your head and I find myself nodding my head and feeling nothing but sorrow because in 2019 we have not come far enough. To think we are pushing ourselves back to a time in this country where we are once again seen as "other" and "wrong" I don't know what we do to combat it."JAMES BALDWIN: Well, I don’t think there’s much hope for it, you know, to tell you the truth as long as people are using this peculiar language. It’s not a question of what happens to the Negro here or to the black man here—that’s a very vivid question for me, you know—but the real question is what is going to happen to this country. I have to repeat that."
"Forget the Negro problem. Don’t write any voting acts. We had that—it’s called the fifteenth amendment—during the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. What you have to look at is what is happening in this country, and what is really happening is that brother has murdered brother knowing it was his brother. White men have lynched Negroes knowing them to be their sons. White women have had Negroes burned knowing them to be their lovers. It is not a racial problem. It is a problem of whether or not you’re willing to look at your life and be responsible for it, and then begin to change it. That great Western house I come from is one house, and I am one of the children of that house. Simply, I am the most despised child of that house. And it is because the American people are unable to face the fact that I am flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone, created by them. My blood, my father’s blood, is in that soil."
"JAMES BALDWIN: There is nothing in the evidence offered by the book of the American republic which allows me really to argue with the cat who says to me: “They needed us to pick the cotton and now they don’t need us anymore. Now they don’t need us, they’re going to kill us all off. Just like they did the Indians.” And I can’t say it’s a Christian nation, that your brothers will never do that to you, because the record is too long and too bloody. That’s all we have done. All your buried corpses now begin to speak."
"JAMES BALDWIN: I don’t know what most white people in this country feel. But I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions. I don’t know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know we have a Christian church which is white and a Christian church which is black. I know, as Malcolm X once put it, the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday. That says a great deal for me about a Christian nation. It means I can’t afford to trust most white Christians, and I certainly cannot trust the Christian church."
I end on this.
I am a black woman, when you tell me you don't see my color or it's unimportant, you are telling me you don't see me, that I am not important. When the default color is white and Christian you ignore what makes up this country of ours. To speak out against what we see is wrong is the American thing to do. -
I can't emphasize on it enough. James Baldwin is a gem and I am absolutely and throughly in love with his works. He is the one writer who is a constant when it comes to checking off all the rigid requirements I have set for my reading life. I can even listen to his leisure talks or read his mathematical calculations with an unflinching zeal. I don't want to give an impression that I have read all his works because I have only read two so far. These two, however, were enough to establish a intense longing to read all his works as soon as possible.
Baldwin, for me, continues to be like an afferent nerve when it comes to my attempt to listen to an African-American voice more clearly. His attempt to write a work, with Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Medgar Evers as characters, however, remained unfinished at thirty pages. The work is called Remember This House on which I Am Not Your Negro is based. The book talks about the privilege. It builds on strongly to the structure of African-American voices. It is an outcome of Raoul Peck's effort to dig deeper into his works, interviews and scraps of writings to make a movie as beautiful and vivid as Baldwin's works.
No matter how much I say/write about it, it is so diverse and layered that I wouldn't be able to do justice to it. Read or watch - this is a work which is pushing me away from reaching to the end of the path of conclusion. Sure enough, I can't yet decide whether the written version is better than its screen version.
I owe this book to the god of all books,
Vivek. I trust him with his recommendations and plunge into the books without thinking. Thank you for existing, Vivek. -
When we walked out in the evening, then,
she would leave ahead of me, alone.
I would give her about five minutes,
and then I would walk out alone, taking another
route, and meet her on the subway platform.
We would not acknowledge each other.
We would get into the subway car,
sitting at opposite ends of it,
and walk, separately, through the streets
OF THE FREE AND THE BRAVE,
to wherever we were going—
a friend’s house, or the movies.
This book is for the whole world to the reading.
And the documentary was unbelievably good, not as good as the written word, but still decent good. -
“But what one does realize is that when you try to stand up and look the world into the face like you had a right to be here. When you do that, without knowing that this is-- the result of it, you have attacked the entire power structure of the western world.”
-
I Am Not Your Negro
by James Baldwin, Raoul Peck
I just finished reading a book on Baldwin this month and have been wanting to read this for some time. I read some reviews that suggest to watch the documentary first for the photos so it will make more sense. It did help. Knowing more about his life helped too by reading about him earlier.
I was so sad, full of pain, hopelessness, and rage throughout most of the book. His essays are brilliant. They expose the truth that hangs in the air but no one sees it, no one seems to care.
As each of his friends died, I felt his grief. He loved both King and Malcolm and didn't take sides and said near the end the two were coming closer together. I wondered what that meant. What would have happened if they both hadn't been murdered?
Why is the white man so afraid of the black man? I am so ashamed. I am ashamed of our country that calls America free but still holds back minorities and women.
I loved and hated this book. I loved and agreed with Baldwin. (If I were black man at that time I would probably go with Malcolm, but I am atheist so that wouldn't work! Lol) I hated the book because it exposed the sad story that little has changed and I grief for my country and my black country persons. I grieved over the loss of good men by ignorant, racist that let fear and hatred rule. I grieve because this continues today. -
" What white people have to do, is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place. Because I’m not a nigger. I’m a man, but if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need it. . . . If I’m not a nigger here and you invented him — you, the white people, invented him — then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that. Whether or not it’s able to ask that question." - I Am Not Your Negro
-
Το σενάριο του αριστουργηματικού ντοκιμαντέρ του Ραούλ Πεκ, πέρα από εξαιρετικά καλαίσθητη έκδοση και ιδανικό συμπλήρωμα στην ταινία, είναι ίσως η καλύτερη εισαγωγή στο έργο και τη σκέψη του Τζέιμς Μπόλντουιν, ειδικά τώρα που οι εκδόσεις Πόλις έχουν αρχίσει να εκδίδουν τα σημαντικότερα έργα του. Με αφορμή το ημιτελές έργο του για τους Μάρτιν Λούθερ Κινγκ, Μάλκολμ Χ και Μέντγκαρ Έβερς, ο Πεκ εμπλουτίζει τις πύρινες και παθιασμένες λέξεις του Μπόλντουιν (αλήθεια, πόσο σπουδαίο έργο θα έβγαινε, αν ολοκληρωνόταν) με εικόνες από το κλασικό Χόλιγουντ και με διάφορα επίκαιρα της εποχής για μια συνολική εκτίμηση του βάθους του ρατσισμού μιας χώρας, την οποία ο συγγραφέας εγκατέλειψε προκειμένου να περιπλανηθεί άπατρις στην Ευρώπη, όταν όμως άρχισαν να δολοφονούνται διαδοχικά οι ηγέτες του αγώνα για τα πολιτικά δικαιώματα, επέστρεψε για να παλέψει κι αυτός σε έναν αγώνα που ακόμα δεν έχει κερδηθεί.
-
“I can’t be a pessimist, because I’m alive. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive.
What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it is necessary to have a ‘nigger’ in the first place, because I am not a nigger, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need him. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” -
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.
*
I don’t know what most white people in this country feel. But I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions. I don’t know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know we have a Christian church which is white and a Christian church which is black. I know, as Malcolm X once put it, the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday. That says a great deal for me about a Christian nation. It means I can’t afford to trust most white Christians, and I certainly cannot trust the Christian church. I don’t know whether the labor unions and their bosses really hate me—that doesn’t matter—but I know I’m not in their union. I don’t know whether the real estate lobby has anything against black people, but I know the real estate lobby is keeping me in the ghetto. I don’t know if the board of education hates black people, but I know the textbooks they give my children to read and the schools we have to go to. Now, this is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my wife, my woman, my sister, my children on some idealism which you assure me exists in America, which I have never seen.
Oct 7, 18 -
Incensed and inspired at once. It is so terrifying, all that America has yet to reckon with: the way history repeats itself; the irresponsibility with which white Americans have criminalized our humanity and have failed to distinguish themselves from the hateful hive mind under the feeble pretense of fear. Equally infuriating is this pacifistic notion of Blacks being expected to behave, to smile through it, to endure centuries of savage violence. And what better way to drive that fear than through terrorism, through claiming our pioneers like Malcolm, Martin, Medgar, and so on.
I’ll be revisiting Baldwin’s words for the rest of my life as the generations after me will, words which have been both a gateway of freedom in this diabolical place we call America. -
"It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace, and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you."
I knew this was a companion to the documentary (highly recommended), but I still found it to be a good introduction to James Baldwin. Now I need to read everything else that Baldwin has ever written. -
I'm ashamed to admit this is my first formal encounter with James Baldwin's work. And that said, this slim book is more like a scrapbook than an actual Baldwin collection. Raoul Peck, the director of "I Am Not Your Negro" has cobbled together both published and unpublished snippets of Baldwin's writing into a compelling new narrative. They are interspersed with other texts -- film quotes, interviews with Malcolm X or MLK Jr. -- which I assume are in the film. (I hope the film comes to my local theater!)
This book is, sadly, still timely. Baldwin astute observes the lopsided balance of power in our divided America. What's incredible to me are the transcripts of intellectual debates from the 1960s and 70s. Do we even have these anymore? If they're being aired, I'm not aware of them. I imagine no one produces them because they won't get ratings. This is not a dig at the "media," either, who feed those with closed eyes and open mouths. It's a dig at those too intellectually lazy to consume these types of ideas. Although Baldwin has plenty of critiques of the Hollywood of the 50s and 60s for pushing a white ideal that no one, not even white people, can live up to.
Anyway, my review will basically be a scrapbook too, of my favorite quotes from the book.
We must realize this, that no other country in the world has been so fat and so sleek, and so safe, and so happy, and so irresponsible, and so dead.
You never had to look at me. I had to look at you. I know more about you than you know about me. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
People finally say to you, in an attempt to dismiss the social reality, "But you're so bitter!" Well, I may or may not be bitter, but if I were, I would have good reasons for it: chief among them that American blindness, or cowardice, which allows us to pretend that life presents no reasons for being bitter.
There are days -- this is one of the -- when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it. How precisely are you going to reconcile yourself to your situation here and how you are going to communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here. I'm terrified of the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don't think I'm human. And I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become in themselves moral monsters.
Let me put it this way: that from a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports and the railroads of the country; the economy, especially of the Southern states, could not conceivably be what it has become if they had not had, and do not still have, indeed, and for so long--so many generations--cheap labor.
---
I've ordered another book of Baldwin's. -
The good thing about reading a James Baldwin book is that you already know you will enjoy it; you already know you are going to stop several times and absorb the very powerful sentences he creates. You already know that it will make a strong impact.
Of course, the paperback version of I Am Not Your Negro (as opposed to the film version), was not my first introduction to James Baldwin. I have been an avid fan of JB for almost 4 years now, and always go back to him; his speeches, interviews and clips to bring home the severity of the African-American problem and to remind myself why I am such an emotional advocate to the cause.
The African-American problem, the American problem, translates to me to something much bigger than the African-American man, or America; it is something much bigger than that. The problem is not of the African-American man, it is of the African man as a whole, everywhere. To think that Africans have been subjected to the same terror in the whole world as they have in America is not only a disturbing though, it goes beyond that; it is simply unfathomable.
The issue here, I believe, though is what the United States claims to be; that is a democratic country, who the American people claim to be, that is a tolerant people. To put it simply, what can be seen from history and what is to some degree seems like a repetition of history only proves the opposite. We have, almost in a blink of an eye, found ourselves at a point where James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers are becoming more and more relevant.
This is a message that needs to be heard; by African-Americans and by white Americans. By all Africans and by all people. In such a few short words James Baldwin's unfinished manuscript for his Remember This House project brings down the roof on your head. His eloquent words and beautifully structured sentences express the African American problem in a way no one else before him or after him has been able to. -
Διαβάζοντας πρώτα το βιβλίο και παρακολουθώντας ύστερα το ομότιτλο ντοκιμαντέρ βίωσα μια πολύ δυνατή εμπειρία.
Ο R. Peck έγινε δέκτης ενός "δώρου" από την κόρη του Baldwin, 30 σελίδες ενός ημιτελούς έργου, που θέλησε να τις αξιοποιήσει και μεις του είμαστε ευγνώμονες.
Τρεις άντρες,
Μάλκολμ Χ,
Μάρτιν Λούθερ Κινγκ,
Μέντγκαρ Έβερς,
έγραψαν ιστορία, έγιναν σύμβολα μέσα από τους αγώνες τους και τις δολοφονίες τους. Τρεις διαφορετικές οπτικές, με κοινό παρονομαστή, τον πόλεμο έναντι του μίσους, την επιβίωση.
Ο κόσμος των Δυτικών είναι φτιαγμένος πάνω σε εκατομμύρια ανθρώπινες ψυχές, κυριολεκτικά. Έχτισαν έναν κάλπικο πολιτισμό θυσιάζοντας ανθρώπους και πολιτισμούς, με το ισχυρότερο όπλο τους, την πόλωση.
Λευκός σημαίνει Καπιταλισμός, σημαίνει τραπεζικό σύστημα και εκμετάλλευση.
Σημαίνει δικαιώματα που κανείς δεν μπορεί να του στερήσει.
Σημαίνει πως η θρησκεία, η πολιτική και ο πολιτισμός του ανήκουν.
Σημαίνει ακίνδυνος, σωτήρας, εξανθρωπιστής, "πολιτισμένος", ανώριμος και δολοφόνος.
Η ζυγαριά όμως για να ισορροπήσει χρειάζεται πάντοτε ένα αντίβαρο, κι αυτό τον ρόλο τον "χάρισαν" στους Άγριους. Διαχωρίστηκαν από τους ανθρώπους, χρησιμοποιώντας ένα γελοίο κριτήριο, αυτό του χρώματος, ώστε να μπορούν να καταπατούν ανεμπόδιστα ανθρώπινα δικαιώματα. -
Do yourself a favor and read this book. Allow the power of Baldwin's words to cascade over you as if you were trapped in a waterfall of truth.
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"Η ρίζα του μίσους του μαύρου είναι η οργή και δεν είναι τόσο ότι μισεί τους λευκούς όσο ότι απλώς δεν θέλει να τους βρίσκει στο δρόμο του, πόσο μάλλον στον δρόμο των παιδιών του.
Η ρίζα του μίσους του λευκού είναι ο τρόμος, ένας απύθμενος και ακατονόμαστος τρόμος, που εστιάζεται σε αυτή την απειλητική φιγούρα, μια οντότητα που δεν ζει παρά μόνο στο μυαλό του λευκού." -
The companion book to the documentary of the same name is based largely on notes from
James Baldwin's non-fiction work Remember This House, which he began writing in 1979 but did not finish before his death in 1987. Baldwin's aim in writing this book was to tell the story of the United States through the lives of three seminal figures in the Civil Rights Movement, all of whom were close friends of his: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., who were assassinated in 1963, 1965 and 1968, respectively. In this book, Baldwin's excerpted words from Remember This House are converted into poetic form, which lends them greater power. Interspersed between these "poems" are portions of past speeches and interviews, photographs that accompany the text, and a limited number of current references, most notably the sequence that consists of apologies by Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Anthony Weiner, the former US congressman who was forced to step down after sexual misconduct and was further disgraced by additional misbehaviors, and Thomas Jackson, the former chief of police of Ferguson, Missouri.
Raoul Peck's compilation does a superb service in bringing James Baldwin's unflinching words to light for those of us who revere him, and to newer audiences who are unfamiliar with him and the searing power of his words. I look forward to seeing the documentary, and to returning to this excellent compilation. -
As a standalone book I have some problems with it: it is fragmented which maybe isn't fully a bad thing as it forces you to think a bit about the connections between the parts but in the end I'm not sure whether they really cohere in the book. The movie is a different story.
I also felt like Peck didn't really succeed in connecting the three murders of Evers, King and X other than in the more general story of American racial discrimination against blacks. Apparently this was the premise of Baldwin's notes for a book called "Remember This House" which inspired this project. I wish we could have Baldwin's version.
I'm not sure I trust Peck to fully express Baldwin's ideas in book form. Mostly because as a filmmaker I imagine he was looking for visually arresting images and juxtapositions and relied on recorded interviews with Baldwin rather than his writings. Unfortunately I haven't read any of Baldwin's books so I'll have to reserve judgement on this for now.
(update: having just read Notes of a Native Son, which is really just scratching the surface, I can tell that the movie is also really just scratching the surface, but I think it is still valuable for collecting some of his riveting appearances in one place and for introducing more people to Baldwin's ideas.)
