The Fire This Time: ‘I Am Not Your Negro’ Is Somber Brilliance

I Am Not Your Negro is a lesson in duality in both form and function. The film is equal parts a maelstrom of black rage and a sleek, surgical assessment of the American Dream as it pertains to race. James Baldwin was out there in the world letting heads know it wasn’t RuPaul’s best friend race from jump street. There is a somber brilliance that permeates the experience; brilliance in Baldwin’s competence as a social doctor, diagnosing the illness of the times, somber in that at the film’s end, you relate totally to his vision of the United States of the 1960s – in 2017. Brilliance, in relaying the queerness of Baldwin’s intense and sharp affect; serving face and side-eye alongside inflammatory social critique. Somber, knowing that part of his identity was never openly celebrated. Samuel L. Jackson’s narration gives the viewer pause, as one hears how his voice lends Baldwin’s words weight. Our familiarity with Jackson is obscured by the subject matter of Baldwin’s unfinished book, Remember This House. Jackson doesn’t speak from the “I” at all, he simply reads what Baldwin wrote. He doesn’t even read it ‘muthafuckily’, he just reads what Baldwin wrote.

Raoul Peck’s minimalist visual direction is stunning. I Am Not Your Negro is largely black and white (I see what I did there, and didn’t mean to) with video of Baldwin crossing the country and the world with the ease and unease awarded his unique perspective. Excerpts from the Remember manuscript or the text from an FBI report w…