I Am Not Your Negro

05/08/2025

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In I Am Not Your Negro James Baldwin, during a debate, speaks of Bobby Kennedy, who all but proposed that in forty years, if the blacks are good, the whites may let a person of colour become president. The film cuts to various black people in monochrome photographs before cutting to colour news footage of Barack Obama becoming that figure. Baldwin comments in the context of four hundred years of oppression, and that while a white man will be expected to become president in 1968 (the debate was in 1965), blacks will have to bide their time and consider themselves lucky. It took a little over forty years for the US to get its first black president, and even then, there were debates over his blackness. NBC noted, “Obama has said, ‘I identify as African-American — that's how I'm treated and that's how I'm viewed. I'm proud of it.’ In other words, the world gave Obama no choice but to be black, and he was happy to oblige.” But one might wonder if Obama was white enough for voters to accept him, and still too black for many who followed the Obama years with a president from German/Scottish stock and with dubious views about black people, including Obama and most obviously conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace, musing that Obama wasn’t a proper American.

        I Am Not Your Negro was made at the end of Obama’s presidency in 2016, and if it doesn’t seem like a triumphal account of black freedom, it rests on Baldwin’s always complex reckoning with American racism. Based on Baldwin’s thirty pages of notes for his unfinished 1979 book Remember This House, Haitian Raul Peck’s documentary uses numerous still photographs, archival footage and film clips from 1934’s Imitation of Life, The Defiant Ones, In the Heat of the Night, A Raisin in the Sun, The Pyjama Game and others. Peck’s film does justice to the intricacy of Baldwin’s writing through the diverse range of materials explored. However, Michael Koresky wonders whether “…translating his teeming prose and political clarity to the film format risks straying from the unerring paths his essays and novels forged; his theories about systemic racism and the congenital historical catastrophe that is American personhood are so passionately, expertly argued…” Indeed, “…they so completely intertwine the personal anecdote and the societal diagnosis, that to disrupt the flow of words, sentences, paragraphs with images and music could potentially delimit their power.” The nuanced Koresky finally comes down against the film, seeing “the result is an essayistic patchwork rather than a genuine essay film.” (Reverse Shot)

   This might seem a little harsh but given the film has been almost universally well-received, it’s always good to have dissenting voices, even if we might have preferred Koresky to say what a genuine essay film was, and how I Am Not Your Negro fails to be an example of it. Laura Rascaroli reckons an important factor in its evolution was the end of metanarratives “heralded by Jean-Francois Lyotard in 1979…and with the consequent phenomenon of the diminishing of authority found in and promoted by postmodern discourse.” (The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film) In the essay film, Voice of God narration gives way to more personal reflection and filmmakers emphasise the meditative over the authoritative. Films by Ross McElwee, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Agnes Varda, and Harun Farocki would all be examples. 

       Perhaps one reason I Am Not Your Negro is half essay film, half historical account, with Baldwin taking care of the essayistic and Peck the history of black consciousness in the post-war years, rests on the personal so completely colliding with the collective. When the film explores the lives of three political activists, all dead before the end of the sixties — Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King — it is clear that their deaths were linked very closely to the colour of their skin. If the phrase the personal is the political was a popular slogan during the sixties, it was certainly so for black Americans interested in political action. The decade may have been a febrile time with both Robert and Bobby Kennedy assassinated, but they weren’t murdered for being white, while Evers, Malcom and King were for being black. The political was almost inevitably personal, but equally, the personal was almost inevitably political. “I couldn’t sit somewhere honing my talent to a fine edge after I had been to all those places in the South”, Baldwin says, “and seen those boys and girls, men and women, black and white, longing for change. It was impossible for me to drop them a visit and then leave.” (Paris Review)

           It is as I Am Not Your Negro fails to be an essay film partly because it contains so much more history than we might usually expect from such a work, with the political swamping the personal so that though it may be based on Baldwin’s notes, the Civil Rights Movement and the events that preceded it and followed it are no less central. It is a matter of perspective whether Baldwin’s work has been diluted or intensified by Peck’s film, but it makes sense, for example, that Peck offers so many film clips. Baldwin wrote a short book on cinema called The Devil Finds Work, where he talks about some of the films we find in clip form in I Am Not Your Negro. In the book, he says of The Defiant Ones that if blacks and whites hate each other, it is for different reasons. “The root of the white man’s hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on the black, surfacing, and concentrating on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind. But the root of the black man’s hatred is rage, and he does no so much hate white men as simply want them out of his way, and more than that, out of his children’s way.” When he offers this claim, Baldwin says “this is perhaps a very subtle argument” and there are others in the book, on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, for example, where one sees that a documentary cannot easily match the intricacy of Baldwin’s thought, no matter Samuel L. Jackson’s fine voice over. 

      What it can do though, is contextualise where such claims were coming from.  When we see footage of blacks being beaten by white cops the viewer might see this as a fifties ignorance, southern police officers unaware that times are changing and that racist America is in retreat. But then it also shows us the Rodney King beating at the beginning and the 90s to suggest little has changed — and who will be watching now, well aware of George Floyd’s death, or before that (and to which the film attends) Michael Brown’s in Ferguson in 2014? When Baldwin says that the white person’s terror of the black is chiefly a figment of their imagination, while a black feels rage against whites who have power over them, it reveals the difficulty of the personal, a luxury he proposes the white person can entertain as the black becomes part of their imaginary, while the white for the black is unavoidably part of their reality. At one moment in the film, Peck seems potentially to have moved very away from its subject. Jackson speaks of a Dostoevsky character from The Idiot which is followed by footage from a Fifties Doris Day musical, as Peck goes lateral all the better to suggest the depth of the film’s pertinence. The character in The Idiot doesn’t believe in the wagons that bring bread to humanity, because a considerable portion of humanity is excluded from partaking of that bread. Jackson then notes that for a long time America prospered, and this prosperity cost many people their lives as we see happy whites enjoying themselves in The Pyjama Game. This is the oblivious prosperity no black in the 1950s could have entertained and in such moments Peck skilfully proposes that if his work cannot quite match Baldwin’s meditative prose (no matter how much it quotes from it), it can expand on the theme that so interested the American writer by using film and archival footage, footage showing the difficulty of distinguishing a personal life from one whose agency is so reliant on the various assumptions and beliefs that shape a black person’s existence. It must be hard to hear homilies about universal humanity, must be a little easier watching an idealistic musical when all those frolicking are white, but the sort of thoughts Baldwin expresses find in Peck’s images a mixed-media irony that the words themselves wouldn’t quite capture.

    This isn’t to say Peck’s film is more significant than Baldwin’s various non-fiction writings — putting aside his important fiction, including Giovanni’s Room, Going to Meet the Man and Go Tell It on the Mountain. It is, though, to acknowledge that Peck’s work can take the essay, turn it into a film and rather than insisting it loses the qualities of an essay film, it becomes de-personalising. This might be the aspiration of essay films generally, where the personal increasingly absorbs elements that would seem far removed from introspection. If Chris Marker is often seen as the father of the essay film, a director whose Letter from Siberia was deemed by Andre Bazin as central to this style, then it rests on the tension between literary insistence and visual elaboration. Writing on Bazin and Marker, Chris Darke reckons “in all its literariness, all its baggy epistolary diversity and travelogue-happy self-consciousness, [Letter to Siberia] is truly the model for many of the films that follow, all the way to Sans soleil.” (Film Comment) For Philip Lopate, in an essay film the text must resemble a single voice, the text must impart more than information and, first and foremost, an essay film “must have words in the form of a text either spoken, subtitled or inter titled.” (‘The Essay-Film’) But the essay-film is a compound, and images are important to it even if a thought must sit behind the visual. It should assert itself in language, but if the images only illustrate the verbal, then this is a Voice of God documentary; a typically narrated film that doesn’t indicate a singular perspective but assumes a general account, evident in the typical BBC documentary. Adam Curtis may have pushed the boundaries of such works, but this might not quite pass for the essayistic. The voice is a little too authoritative, a little too impersonal, no matter the jaundiced and well-constructed nature of Curtis’s arguments. Equally, Michael Moore’s films fall short of the essay film: they lack the speculative, meditative quality and work more as polemics against something (the US’s reaction to 9/11; America’s health system;  the country’s complacency over guns).

   Yet at the same time, an essay film needs to be more than self-absorbed, even if itis  usually less than authoritative. The strength of I Am Not Your Negro, is that Peck insistently situates Baldwin within the material, making it at least a half-essay film, determined to give voice to Baldwin’s thoughts through the visual augmentation, all the better to show that Baldwin may have been a writer with a singular voice, but he couldn’t assume that voice wasn’t one that he shared with millions of others and hence to the depersonalisation. What matters is to speak for oneself but acknowledge that these are thoughts that potentially belong to many, many more. No white writer would make such a claim racially, though they might in the context of gender or nation; believing that they write within a clear need for feminist emancipation or Algerian, Ukrainian or Basque independence. But as Baldwin says, he felt this oppression very racially indeed. “By teaching a black child he is worthless, that he can never contribute anything to civilization you’re teaching him how to hate his mother, his father and his brothers. Everyone in my generation has seen the wreckage this has caused.” (A Rap on Race)  

  Yet the film proposes that while such feelings of worthlessness must surely have gone away, there is no reason in the 21st century for black Americans to feel without value, and partly due to the insistence of Evers, Malcom X and King, as well as Baldwin, that doesn’t quite mean the oppression has disappeared with it. For every Obama there is a Michael Brown, for every Oprah Winfrey, a George Floyd. Blacks may be half as likely as whites to get killed by the police, but they are only 13.7 of the population while whites are 75.3 per cent. It would seem black Americans needn’t feel they cannot progress in contemporary America, but this might reflect more a capitalist economy than an equal one, with society offering the opportunity for all people potentially to prosper but for many a black to remain at the mercy of the social institutions that were oppressing them long before the Civil Right Movements. 

     It might not be a deliberate irony but it does capture something of the US’s contradictions when money matters more than making people’s lives better. Near the film’s conclusion, Jackson notes through Baldwin that “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. 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.” Such a country will have no problem with anyone who can make large sums of money, and one of those who can do so is none other than the actor offering the film’s voiceover. Jackson’s films have made more than any other actor’s: “Movies featuring Jackson as a protagonist collectively amassed 5.85 billion U.S. dollars domestically.” (Statista) The film makes nothing of this, nor does it inform us that, as he narrates over footage of Martin Luther King’s funeral, that he was one of the ushers. Such details would surely have been central to the self-reflexivity of a full essay-film and helps explain why Koresky sees I Am Not Your Negro as falling short of one. It is instead chiefly a homage to a writer who was more involved in the Civil Rights Movements than any, and a work that shows in its use of various pieces of footage mainly of the times Baldwin was living through, that it wouldn’t have been easy for a black writer to pretend he wasn’t part of a broader history.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

I Am Not Your Negro

In I Am Not Your Negro James Baldwin, during a debate, speaks of Bobby Kennedy, who all but proposed that in forty years, if the blacks are good, the whites may let a person of colour become president. The film cuts to various black people in monochrome photographs before cutting to colour news footage of Barack Obama becoming that figure. Baldwin comments in the context of four hundred years of oppression, and that while a white man will be expected to become president in 1968 (the debate was in 1965), blacks will have to bide their time and consider themselves lucky. It took a little over forty years for the US to get its first black president, and even then, there were debates over his blackness. NBC noted, “Obama has said, ‘I identify as African-American — that's how I'm treated and that's how I'm viewed. I'm proud of it.’ In other words, the world gave Obama no choice but to be black, and he was happy to oblige.” But one might wonder if Obama was white enough for voters to accept him, and still too black for many who followed the Obama years with a president from German/Scottish stock and with dubious views about black people, including Obama and most obviously conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace, musing that Obama wasn’t a proper American.

        I Am Not Your Negro was made at the end of Obama’s presidency in 2016, and if it doesn’t seem like a triumphal account of black freedom, it rests on Baldwin’s always complex reckoning with American racism. Based on Baldwin’s thirty pages of notes for his unfinished 1979 book Remember This House, Haitian Raul Peck’s documentary uses numerous still photographs, archival footage and film clips from 1934’s Imitation of Life, The Defiant Ones, In the Heat of the Night, A Raisin in the Sun, The Pyjama Game and others. Peck’s film does justice to the intricacy of Baldwin’s writing through the diverse range of materials explored. However, Michael Koresky wonders whether “…translating his teeming prose and political clarity to the film format risks straying from the unerring paths his essays and novels forged; his theories about systemic racism and the congenital historical catastrophe that is American personhood are so passionately, expertly argued…” Indeed, “…they so completely intertwine the personal anecdote and the societal diagnosis, that to disrupt the flow of words, sentences, paragraphs with images and music could potentially delimit their power.” The nuanced Koresky finally comes down against the film, seeing “the result is an essayistic patchwork rather than a genuine essay film.” (Reverse Shot)

   This might seem a little harsh but given the film has been almost universally well-received, it’s always good to have dissenting voices, even if we might have preferred Koresky to say what a genuine essay film was, and how I Am Not Your Negro fails to be an example of it. Laura Rascaroli reckons an important factor in its evolution was the end of metanarratives “heralded by Jean-Francois Lyotard in 1979…and with the consequent phenomenon of the diminishing of authority found in and promoted by postmodern discourse.” (The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film) In the essay film, Voice of God narration gives way to more personal reflection and filmmakers emphasise the meditative over the authoritative. Films by Ross McElwee, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Agnes Varda, and Harun Farocki would all be examples. 

       Perhaps one reason I Am Not Your Negro is half essay film, half historical account, with Baldwin taking care of the essayistic and Peck the history of black consciousness in the post-war years, rests on the personal so completely colliding with the collective. When the film explores the lives of three political activists, all dead before the end of the sixties — Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King — it is clear that their deaths were linked very closely to the colour of their skin. If the phrase the personal is the political was a popular slogan during the sixties, it was certainly so for black Americans interested in political action. The decade may have been a febrile time with both Robert and Bobby Kennedy assassinated, but they weren’t murdered for being white, while Evers, Malcom and King were for being black. The political was almost inevitably personal, but equally, the personal was almost inevitably political. “I couldn’t sit somewhere honing my talent to a fine edge after I had been to all those places in the South”, Baldwin says, “and seen those boys and girls, men and women, black and white, longing for change. It was impossible for me to drop them a visit and then leave.” (Paris Review)

           It is as I Am Not Your Negro fails to be an essay film partly because it contains so much more history than we might usually expect from such a work, with the political swamping the personal so that though it may be based on Baldwin’s notes, the Civil Rights Movement and the events that preceded it and followed it are no less central. It is a matter of perspective whether Baldwin’s work has been diluted or intensified by Peck’s film, but it makes sense, for example, that Peck offers so many film clips. Baldwin wrote a short book on cinema called The Devil Finds Work, where he talks about some of the films we find in clip form in I Am Not Your Negro. In the book, he says of The Defiant Ones that if blacks and whites hate each other, it is for different reasons. “The root of the white man’s hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on the black, surfacing, and concentrating on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind. But the root of the black man’s hatred is rage, and he does no so much hate white men as simply want them out of his way, and more than that, out of his children’s way.” When he offers this claim, Baldwin says “this is perhaps a very subtle argument” and there are others in the book, on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, for example, where one sees that a documentary cannot easily match the intricacy of Baldwin’s thought, no matter Samuel L. Jackson’s fine voice over. 

      What it can do though, is contextualise where such claims were coming from.  When we see footage of blacks being beaten by white cops the viewer might see this as a fifties ignorance, southern police officers unaware that times are changing and that racist America is in retreat. But then it also shows us the Rodney King beating at the beginning and the 90s to suggest little has changed — and who will be watching now, well aware of George Floyd’s death, or before that (and to which the film attends) Michael Brown’s in Ferguson in 2014? When Baldwin says that the white person’s terror of the black is chiefly a figment of their imagination, while a black feels rage against whites who have power over them, it reveals the difficulty of the personal, a luxury he proposes the white person can entertain as the black becomes part of their imaginary, while the white for the black is unavoidably part of their reality. At one moment in the film, Peck seems potentially to have moved very away from its subject. Jackson speaks of a Dostoevsky character from The Idiot which is followed by footage from a Fifties Doris Day musical, as Peck goes lateral all the better to suggest the depth of the film’s pertinence. The character in The Idiot doesn’t believe in the wagons that bring bread to humanity, because a considerable portion of humanity is excluded from partaking of that bread. Jackson then notes that for a long time America prospered, and this prosperity cost many people their lives as we see happy whites enjoying themselves in The Pyjama Game. This is the oblivious prosperity no black in the 1950s could have entertained and in such moments Peck skilfully proposes that if his work cannot quite match Baldwin’s meditative prose (no matter how much it quotes from it), it can expand on the theme that so interested the American writer by using film and archival footage, footage showing the difficulty of distinguishing a personal life from one whose agency is so reliant on the various assumptions and beliefs that shape a black person’s existence. It must be hard to hear homilies about universal humanity, must be a little easier watching an idealistic musical when all those frolicking are white, but the sort of thoughts Baldwin expresses find in Peck’s images a mixed-media irony that the words themselves wouldn’t quite capture.

    This isn’t to say Peck’s film is more significant than Baldwin’s various non-fiction writings — putting aside his important fiction, including Giovanni’s Room, Going to Meet the Man and Go Tell It on the Mountain. It is, though, to acknowledge that Peck’s work can take the essay, turn it into a film and rather than insisting it loses the qualities of an essay film, it becomes de-personalising. This might be the aspiration of essay films generally, where the personal increasingly absorbs elements that would seem far removed from introspection. If Chris Marker is often seen as the father of the essay film, a director whose Letter from Siberia was deemed by Andre Bazin as central to this style, then it rests on the tension between literary insistence and visual elaboration. Writing on Bazin and Marker, Chris Darke reckons “in all its literariness, all its baggy epistolary diversity and travelogue-happy self-consciousness, [Letter to Siberia] is truly the model for many of the films that follow, all the way to Sans soleil.” (Film Comment) For Philip Lopate, in an essay film the text must resemble a single voice, the text must impart more than information and, first and foremost, an essay film “must have words in the form of a text either spoken, subtitled or inter titled.” (‘The Essay-Film’) But the essay-film is a compound, and images are important to it even if a thought must sit behind the visual. It should assert itself in language, but if the images only illustrate the verbal, then this is a Voice of God documentary; a typically narrated film that doesn’t indicate a singular perspective but assumes a general account, evident in the typical BBC documentary. Adam Curtis may have pushed the boundaries of such works, but this might not quite pass for the essayistic. The voice is a little too authoritative, a little too impersonal, no matter the jaundiced and well-constructed nature of Curtis’s arguments. Equally, Michael Moore’s films fall short of the essay film: they lack the speculative, meditative quality and work more as polemics against something (the US’s reaction to 9/11; America’s health system;  the country’s complacency over guns).

   Yet at the same time, an essay film needs to be more than self-absorbed, even if itis  usually less than authoritative. The strength of I Am Not Your Negro, is that Peck insistently situates Baldwin within the material, making it at least a half-essay film, determined to give voice to Baldwin’s thoughts through the visual augmentation, all the better to show that Baldwin may have been a writer with a singular voice, but he couldn’t assume that voice wasn’t one that he shared with millions of others and hence to the depersonalisation. What matters is to speak for oneself but acknowledge that these are thoughts that potentially belong to many, many more. No white writer would make such a claim racially, though they might in the context of gender or nation; believing that they write within a clear need for feminist emancipation or Algerian, Ukrainian or Basque independence. But as Baldwin says, he felt this oppression very racially indeed. “By teaching a black child he is worthless, that he can never contribute anything to civilization you’re teaching him how to hate his mother, his father and his brothers. Everyone in my generation has seen the wreckage this has caused.” (A Rap on Race)  

  Yet the film proposes that while such feelings of worthlessness must surely have gone away, there is no reason in the 21st century for black Americans to feel without value, and partly due to the insistence of Evers, Malcom X and King, as well as Baldwin, that doesn’t quite mean the oppression has disappeared with it. For every Obama there is a Michael Brown, for every Oprah Winfrey, a George Floyd. Blacks may be half as likely as whites to get killed by the police, but they are only 13.7 of the population while whites are 75.3 per cent. It would seem black Americans needn’t feel they cannot progress in contemporary America, but this might reflect more a capitalist economy than an equal one, with society offering the opportunity for all people potentially to prosper but for many a black to remain at the mercy of the social institutions that were oppressing them long before the Civil Right Movements. 

     It might not be a deliberate irony but it does capture something of the US’s contradictions when money matters more than making people’s lives better. Near the film’s conclusion, Jackson notes through Baldwin that “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. 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.” Such a country will have no problem with anyone who can make large sums of money, and one of those who can do so is none other than the actor offering the film’s voiceover. Jackson’s films have made more than any other actor’s: “Movies featuring Jackson as a protagonist collectively amassed 5.85 billion U.S. dollars domestically.” (Statista) The film makes nothing of this, nor does it inform us that, as he narrates over footage of Martin Luther King’s funeral, that he was one of the ushers. Such details would surely have been central to the self-reflexivity of a full essay-film and helps explain why Koresky sees I Am Not Your Negro as falling short of one. It is instead chiefly a homage to a writer who was more involved in the Civil Rights Movements than any, and a work that shows in its use of various pieces of footage mainly of the times Baldwin was living through, that it wouldn’t have been easy for a black writer to pretend he wasn’t part of a broader history.


© Tony McKibbin