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Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

evanston_dad James Baldwin began a book called "Remember This House" but died before completing it. It intended to weave together the stories of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers into a tapestry of the black American experience. In "I Am Not Your Negro," Samuel L. Jackson reads the finished portion of the manuscript, and filmmaker Raoul Peck sets the words to images from the Civil Rights Movement and the current Black Lives Matter movement. The result is a bracing and deservedly angry film that captures better than anything I've read or seen yet the reasons behind the frustration and outrage of American blacks.There's a marvelous moment in the film when a philosophy professor challenges Baldwin on the Dick Cavett Show for his attitudes, and basically holds Baldwin (and by extension black people) responsible for the continuing racial divide. His message seems to be "you're the one making an issue out of this, not me." Baldwin's take down of him in eloquent words that I won't even begin to try to replicate captures the essence of the entire film and the black struggle for equality. And Baldwin's criticism doesn't stop at racial issues. He also denounces American popular and material culture in general, accusing Americans of letting consumerism anesthetize them into a false sense of happiness and contentment that allows them to ignore all that is wrong with the American way of life.This is a movie that made me furious at America for continuing to stick its head up its ass when it comes to the subject of race. Watching Baldwin's heartfelt distress over the Civil Rights Movement juxtaposed to recent images from the news made it crystal clear that America has not progressed as much as it would like to think it has. Grade: A

Red_Identity Films like this are needed. I am sure there will be many people who believe that having so many documentaries about race (this, 13th, O.J.:Made in America) all came out within the same year is too much. To that, I say the more and more films that address these issues, the less people will be able to ignore or pretend that these issues still do exist. What I found fascinating about this is that it's not told in your typical format, and perhaps in that way it's different from those other films. Since it is based on a novel it does present itself as a collection of a man's thoughts on the world that he lives in. It's engrossing, intriguing, personal, and incredibly relevant. Definitely recommended.

Howard Schumann A documentary of searing intensity, I Am Not Your Negro is based on an unfinished manuscript by author James Baldwin (Go Tell it on the Mountain, The Fire Next Time) who details his reminiscences of and friendships with civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, whose betrayal and murder he lived to witness. Narrated from the unfinished manuscript by Samuel L. Jackson using an authoritative modulated voice that matches Baldwin's speaking style, Peck's film is more than a retrospective of three civil rights leaders but a persuasive, intuitive case for Baldwin as a poet and prophet.Weaving in old speeches and writings from other books, the film provides an emotional look at the stain of racism in American history through the eyes of a man of impeccable eloquence and depth. Though he was an outspoken critic of American culture, the irony is that he was the only black spokesman that white America could relate to. Peck includes sequences showing the excessive force used by police officers in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, photos of Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin, civil rights protests marches from the 1960s, White-power rallies, and the assassination of Martin Luther King.It is a powerful highlight reel of institutional racism punctuated by Baldwin's acerbic rhetoric, only somewhat mitigated by Bobby Kennedy's speech on King's murder and his prediction that we will have a black president within the next 40 years. Being gay at a time when it was considered as a sickness, Baldwin was always an outsider but it was a vantage point that enabled him to look at American society with blistering detachment. "And what has happened," he said, "is as though I, having always been outside it—more outside it than victimized by it, but mainly outside it—can see it better than you can see it." In his provocative TV interviews such as those on the Dick Cavett show, Baldwin pulls no punches in articulating his outrage at the hypocrisy of Western democracies, singling out Hollywood movies such as Love in the Afternoon and Lover Come Back and stars Gary Cooper and Doris day as being examples of our collective fantasies and their "grotesque appeals to innocence." Reflecting on his childhood, Baldwin recounts how he realized how "This country has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you," and that rooting for the cowboys to kill the Indians, was in fact cheering for the oppressors against himself.Wearily resigned about the Negro's chance for equality in a white-dominated society, Baldwin's outrage often comes across as bitterness and despair yet his message does not feel outdated. He said, "Your history has led you to this moment, and you can only begin to change yourself by looking at what you are doing in the name of your history, in the name of your gods, in the name of your language." His words are even more relevant in today's bitterly divided America in which the fire may not wait for the next time.

maurice yacowar The key line is Baldwin's "History is not about the past. It's about the present. We carry our history."This combination of Samuel Jackson reading Baldwin's unfinished narrative about three black American martyrs with documentary footage of the times zaps to the heart of the current tragedy of America. What Baldwin perceived in 1960s America continues in spades today. He describes America's two founding races as two blocs ignorant of each other, unable to speak to or to understand each other, locked in a mutual fear — portending war. That summarizes our current warring snarl of Republicans and Non-Republicans, the Trumps and their threatened opposition. Here is one of Baldwin's key perceptions: "What white people have to do, is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a (n-word)in the first place. Because I'm not a (n-word); I'm a man. But if you think I'm a (n-word), it means you need it." That is, why do Americans need to conjure an enemy within?In post-Obama neo-racist America, that remains the crux. Add one refinement. The paranoid murderous oppressive class is the same. But add the Latino, Muslim and ever-reliable scapegoat Jew to the Negro as the monster of the white man's imagination. Baldwin looked beyond race for the crux of America's continuing nightmare. He saw mainstream America as pursuing an unsatisfying set of values. Consumerism, materialism and deluded pretences to freedom and democracy have failed to provide the profound contentment and self-acceptance they crave. Feeling victimized, insecure, empty, they seek out an enemy among themselves on whom to blame the inadequacy of their lives. The film is as shocking and terrifying as any horror. The1950s savagery that we thought we had outgrown is back. Trump's looming voucher system for schools will revive the vampire segregation, to perpetuate the underclass's disadvantages. The economy, the climate, the water, national health and safety will all be sacrificed to increase the white power's profits. The fear and hatred of the Other, whether in hue or national origin, has already been trickling down from Trump's diatribes to the playgrounds and besieged borders, synagogues and mosques. And here is the most frightening point. All this destruction, all this inhumanity to man, is facilitated if not actually initiated and inflicted by America's institutions of government. To see the Republican congressmen smiling and nodding at Trump's empty anodynes and lies in his State of the Union address is to realize how the government majority in both houses supports and advances his prejudice and hatred. We still have an attorney general who was disqualified from lower justice appointments because of his racism — and has since been exposed as a perjurer to boot. The oppressive government holds as strangling a grip on America's persecuted citizens now as it had in Jim Crow. Worse still: even had everyone in America watched this film the Electoral College's final verdict would have been the same. Trump's so-called presidency is the symptom of a national disease — eloquently diagnosed by the prescient as well as perceptive James Baldwin.