I Am Not Your Negro

by Velvet Films Inc

  PAUL WEISS: I disagreed with a great deal of it…of course, there’s a good deal I agree with. But I think he’s overlooking one very important matter, I think. Each one of us, I think, is terribly alone. He lives his own individual life. He has all kinds of obstacles in the way of religion or color or size or shape or lack of ability, and the problem is to become a man.

  JAMES BALDWIN: But what I was discussing was not that problem, really. I was discussing the difficulties, the obstacles, the very real danger of death thrown up by the society when a Negro, when a black man attempts to become a man.

  PAUL WEISS: All this emphasis upon black man and white does emphasize something which is here, but it emphasizes, or perhaps exaggerates it and therefore makes us put people together in groups which they ought not to be in. I have more in common with a black scholar than I have with a white man who is against scholarship. And you have more in common with a white author than you have with someone who is against all literature. So why must we always concentrate on color? Or religion? Or this? There are other ways of connecting men.

  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 might’ve gone to Hong Kong, I might have gone to Timbuktu. 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, everybody.

  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 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.

  All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie,

  the lie of their pretended humanism;

  this means that their history

  has no moral justification,

  and that the West has no moral authority.

  “Vile as I am,” states one of the characters

  in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot,

  “I don’t believe in the wagons that bring bread

  to humanity. For the wagons that bring bread

  to humanity…may coldly exclude a considerable

  part of humanity from enjoying what is brought.”

  For a very long time, America prospered:

  this prosperity cost millions of people their lives.

  Now, not even the people who are the most

  spectacular recipients of the benefits of this

  prosperity are able to endure these benefits:

  they can neither understand them

  nor do without them.

  Above all, they cannot imagine the price paid

  by their victims, or subjects, for this way of life,

  and so they cannot afford to know

  why the victims are revolting.

  This is a formula for a nation’s or a kingdom’s

  decline, for no kingdom can maintain

  itself by force alone.

  Force does not work the way

  its advocates think in fact it does.

  It does not, for example, reveal to the victim

  the strength of the adversary.

  On the contrary, it reveals the weakness,

  even the panic of the adversary

  and this revelation invests the victim with patience.

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  There is a day in Palm Springs

  that I will remember forever,

  a bright day.

  I was based in Hollywood, working on the

  screen version of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

  This was a difficult assignment, since I had known

  Malcolm, after all, crossed swords with him,

  worked with him, and held him in that great

  esteem which is not easily distinguishable,

  if it is distinguishable, from love.

  Billy Dee Williams had come to town,

  and he was staying at the house.

  I very much wanted Billy Dee

  for the role of Malcolm.

  The phone had been brought out to the pool,

  and now it rang.

  And I picked it up.

  The record player was still playing.

  “He’s not dead yet, but it’s a head wound.”

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  ROBERT KENNEDY: I have some very sad news for all of you and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world. And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight.

  I hardly remember the rest of the evening at all.

  I remember weeping, briefly,

  more in helpless rage than in sorrow,

  and Billy trying to comfort me.

  But I really don’t remember that evening at all.

  The church was packed.

  In the pew before me sat Marlon Brando,

  Sammy Davis, Eartha Kitt. Sidney Poitier nearby.

  I saw Harry Belafonte sitting next to Coretta King.

  I have a childhood hangover thing

  about not weeping in public,

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  and I was concentrating on holding myself together.

  I did not want to weep for Martin;

  tears seemed futile.

  But I may also have been afraid,

  and I could not have been the only one,

  that if I began to weep, I would not be able to stop.

  I started to cry, and I stumbled.

  Sammy grabbed my arm.

  The story of the Negro in America

  is the story of America.

  It is not a pretty story.

  What can we do?

  Well, I am tired….

  I don’t know how it will come about.

  I know that no matter how it comes about,

  it will be bloody;

  it will be hard.

  I still believe that we can do with this country

  something that has not been done before.

  We are misled here because we think of numbers.

  You don’t need numbers; you need passion.

  And this is proven by the history of the world.

  The tragedy is that most of the people

  who say they care about it do not care.

  What they care about is their safety and their profits.

  The American way of life has failed—

  to make people happier or make them better.

  We do not want to admit this,

  and we do not admit it.

  We persist in believing that

  the empty and criminal among o
ur children

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  are the result of some miscalculation

  in the formula that can be corrected;

  that the bottomless and aimless hostility

  which makes our cities among the most dangerous

  in the world is created, and felt,

  by a handful of aberrants;

  that the lack, yawning everywhere in this country,

  of passionate conviction, of personal authority,

  proves only our rather appealing tendency

  to be gregarious and democratic.

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  To look around the United States today

  is enough to make prophets and angels weep.

  This is not the land of the free;

  it is only very unwillingly and sporadically

  the home of the brave.

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  I sometimes feel it to be an absolute miracle

  that the entire black population of the United States

  of America has not long ago

  succumbed to raging paranoia.

  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.

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  In this country,

  for a dangerously long time,

  there have been two levels of experience.

  One, to put it cruelly, can be summed up

  in the images of Gary Cooper and Doris Day:

  two of the most grotesque appeals

  to innocence the world has ever seen.

  And the other,

  subterranean, indispensable, and denied,

  can be summed up, let us say,

  in the tone and in the face of Ray Charles.

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  RAY CHARLES, “WHAT’D I SAY”

  Hey mama, don’t you treat me wrong

  Come and love your daddy all night long

  All right, all is right now, I know it’s all right, hey hey hey

  When you see me in misery

  Come on baby, see about me.

  And there has never been any genuine confrontation

  between these two levels of experience.

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  DORIS DAY, “SHOULD I SURRENDER” FROM LOVER COME BACK - 1961 -

  Should I be bad or nice?

  Should I surrender?

  His pleading words so tenderly entreat me.

  Is this the night that love finally defeats me?

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  You cannot lynch me

  and keep me in ghettos

  without becoming something monstrous yourselves.

  And furthermore, you give me a terrifying advantage.

  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.

  I AM NOT A NIGGER

  History is not the past.

  It is the present.

  We carry our history with us.

  We are our history.

  If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals.

  I attest to this:

  the world is not white;

  it never was white,

  cannot be white.

  White is a metaphor for power,

  and that is simply a way of describing

  Chase Manhattan Bank.

  THE NEGRO AND THE AMERICAN PROMISE - 1963 -

  JAMES BALDWIN: I can’t be a pessimist, because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive. But the Negro in this country…the future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people and our representatives—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. But if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need him. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….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.

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  CREDITS

  I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO

  (93 min. USA/France/Belgium/Switzerland)

  Directed by Raoul Peck

  Written by James Baldwin,

  compiled and edited by Raoul Peck

  Narrated by Samuel L. Jackson

  Producers: Rémi Grellety, Raoul Peck, Hébert Peck

  Coproducers: Patrick Quinet, Joëlle Bertossa

  With the full support and collaboration

  of the James Baldwin Estate

  Editor: Alexandra Strauss

  Cinematography: Henry Adebonojo, Bill Ross,

  Turner Ross

  Animator: Michel Blustein

  Sound: Valérie Le Docte, David Gillain

  Music: Alexei Aigui

  Archival research: Marie-Hélène Barbéris,

  assisted by Nolwenn Gouault

  ARTE France: Fabrice Puchault, Alex Szalat

  Executive Producers for ITVS: Sally Jo Fifer, Lois Vossen

  Executive Producer for NBPC: Leslie Fields-Cruz

  Produced by Velvet Film, Inc. (USA), Velvet Film

  (France), Artémis Productions, Close Up Films

  In coproduction with ARTE France, Independent Television Service (ITVS) with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), RTS Radio Télévision Suisse, RTBF (Télévision belge), Shelter Prod

  With the support of Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée, MEDIA Programme of the European Union, Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program, National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC), Cinereach, PROCIREP—Société des Producteurs, ANGOA, Taxs​helter.​be, ING, Tax Shelter Incentive of the Federal Government of Belgium, Cinéforom, Loterie Romande

  Sales Agents: ICM Partners, Wide House

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  James Baldwin’s works used for the narration of I Am Not Your Negro:

  “As Much Truth As One Can Bear.” New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1962. Collected in The Cross of Redemption.

  “Black English: A Dishonest Argument.” In Black English and the Education of Black Children and Youth: Proceedings of the National Invitational Symposium on the King Decision. Detroit: Center for Black Studies, Wayne State University, 1980. Collected in The Cross of Redemption.

  The Cross of Redemption. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010.

  The Devil Finds Work. New York: Vintage Books, 1976, 2011.

  Letter from James Baldwin to Jay Acton, June 30, 1979. In “Notes Toward Remember This House,” October 28, 1980.

  “Lorraine Hansberry at the Summit.” Freedomways, no. 19 (1979): 269–72. Collected in The Cross of Redemption.

  “Mass Culture and the Creative Artist: Some Personal Notes.” In Culture for the Millions: Mass Media in Modern Society, edited by Norman Jacobs. Princeton, N. J.: Van Nostrand, 1959. Collected in The Cross of Redemption.

  From Nationalism, Colonialism, and the United States:
One Minute to 12! A Forum Sponsored by the Liberation Committee for Africa on Its First Anniversary Celebration, June 2, 1961. New York: Photo-Offset Press, 1961. Collected in The Cross of Redemption.

  “The News from All the Northern Cities Is, to Understate It, Grim; the State of the Union Is Catastrophic.” New York Times, April 5, 1978. Collected in The Cross of Redemption.

  No Name in the Street. New York: Vintage Books, 1972.

  “Sidney Poitier.” Look, July 23, 1968. Collected in The Cross of Redemption.

  “The White Problem.” In 100 Years of Emancipation, edited by Robert A. Goodwin. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964. Collected in The Cross of Redemption.

  PERMISSIONS

  Permission to reprint the words of James Baldwin is granted by The James Baldwin Estate.

  Lyrics from “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” Bob Dylan, copyright © 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1996 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “What’d I Say,” words and music by Ray Charles, copyright © 1959 (renewed) by Unichappell Music and Mijac Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music. Copyright © Hal Leonard Corporation. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “Should I Surrender,” music by Adam Ross, lyrics by William Landan, copyright © 1962 by Big Sur Music, BMI.

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  1 Malcolm X (Burt Shavitz/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)

  2 Martin Luther King, Jr., with family (pam koner-yohai/Corbis Premium Historical/Getty Images)