Film: I Am Not Your Negro

In the year of the James Baldwin Centennial,  Come watch and discuss: I Am Not Your Negro.

Filmmaker Raoul Peck’s Oscar-nominated documentary features the work of the late writer, poet, and social critic, James Baldwin.

“I Am Not Your Negro offers an incendiary snapshot of James Baldwin’s crucial observations on American race relations…” – Critical Consensus Rotten Tomatoes

At the time of his death in 1987, Baldwin was working on a book, Remember This House, on the lives of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. While it was never completed, his notes for the book became the foundation for Peck’s film.

Timely quotes by James Baldwin:

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality. Or, I am saying, in other words, that we, the elders, are the only models children have. What we see in the children is what they have seen in us–or, more accurately perhaps, what they see in us.”

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time — and in one’s work.”

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Watch the trailer.

There will never be a revolutionary movement in this country that doesn’t fully unleash and give expression to the sometimes openly expressed, sometimes expressed in partial ways, sometimes expressed in wrong ways, but deeply, deeply felt desire to be rid of these long centuries of oppression [of Black people.] There’s never gonna be a revolution in this country, and there never should be, that doesn’t make that one key foundation of what it’s all about” by Bob Avakian, BAsics