I Am Not Your Negro

"God forgives murder and God forgives adultery, but He is very angry, and he actually curses those who do integrate."

         a white woman, 1957, when schools were being desegregated in Little Rock
                               from the documentary, I Am Not Your Negro.


Growing up in the segregated South, I was fascinated with "colored people"--as they were called--not that I knew a single one personally.  In Cochran, Georgia, they were The Other--the only racial Other. They lived in unpainted shacks on Sixth Street and they went to separate schools and churches.

If they wanted to see a movie at the Vogue Theater, they "knew their place"--the balcony.  They had no swimming pools and were denied service at soda fountains and in restaurants.

When I heard them talk in stores, I'd stand near them to listen, trying to absorb their accents and their speech patterns.  When I heard gospel and other "Black" music in later years, it felt like I was remembering actually hearing it in those days--though, except for my mother's Mahalia Jackson record, I rarely did.

I had a knack--I'm embarrassed to say--of imitating "colored talk."  I didn't mean it to be disparaging of them, but of course it was.  If the town's Other had been people from any other place, I'd probably have had the same curiosity turned mimicry.  To approximate the accents of other people felt like gaining access into their psyches, though it was only superficial access.

A Tennessee aunt found it funny--my only claim to funniness--and asked me to do it when we got together, and I did.  But I also did it walking to school after piano lessons, alone, with my made up alter-ego named Jessie.

I Am Not Your Negro is a profound, moving, and brilliant film based on the writing of James Baldwin about the murders of his friends,  Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X.  Film clips, music, interviews and photographs are used to tell the story visually while listening to the spoken words of James Baldwin.

Some of what Baldwin writes about could have been written in 2017:

I'm terrified at the cruel 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. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters."

What has resurrected so much hatred directed toward immigrants, Black Americans, and Others?  Maybe it's been there all the time, but the rhetoric of today has brought it to the fore again.  Insults and threats from the Trump-era top has opened the door for hate speech, resurrected the Rebel flag on belt buckles and bumper stickers,  and seen the bizarre reappearance of Nazi symbols and deadly chants like we heard in Charlottesville, Virginia, this year.

All Americans who believe--as one senator recently said--that "America is a beacon of light to the world" should see this powerful film and consider whether, in the light of our history, that's true.

"We cannot fix what we can't face," Baldwin says.  "But we can't fix anything until we can face it."