“Not everything that is faced can be changed,” said the American writer and social commentator James Baldwin, whose unfinished memoir Remember This House director Raoul Peck has adapted into an absorbing documentary as voiced by Samuel L. Jackson. To which he added: “But nothing can be changed if it is not faced.” And one of the central issues which the Oscar-nominated I Am Not Your Negro wants white Americans and for that matter the wider world to face (for many a Scot made his fortune from the slave trade too) is: “why it was necessary to have a ‘nigger’ in the first place.”

Cheap labour, obviously. After all, the descendants of African Americans did not leave their homelands, risk life and limb crossing the Atlantic and work long hours under insufferable conditions to line the pockets of their whip-cracking masters through choice. “Niggers” were “invented” by white people. But given that slaves are not needed to pick cotton anymore, why is racism – institutional and interpersonal – still such a major problem in America? Baldwin’s theory, which is as relevant now as it was during his lifetime (he died in 1987), is that white people are “terrified of their private selves” and “cruelly trapped between what [they] would like to be and who [they] are”.

Theories aside, one thing which Baldwin and by extension director Raoul Peck are sure about is that the future of America “depends” on white people finding it in their hearts to answer why it was necessary to have a “nigger” in the first place. Until they face that question head-on, nothing can be changed. The gap between rich and poor will continue to widen. Relations between the police and the black community will continue to sour. And dinosaurs in the shape of “moral monsters” from “the vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel, white majority” (or to use Hilary Clinton-speak “the basket of deplorables”) will continue to roam the earth.

Though much of Peck’s documentary like Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript concerns itself with the lives and deaths of civil rights activists Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King (all of whom were a ssassinated, none of whom reached forty), what really captured my attention was Baldwin’s brilliant communication skills both as a writer and an orator. Intelligent, passionate, brave, honest, articulate, persuasive, funny… He makes most modern commentators sound like the speaking clock. And his blistering response to a Yale philosophy professor on The Dick Cavett Show who asked him “So why must we always concentrate on colour?” is worth the entrance money alone.

My only criticism is that, while I understand the thrust of the film was more about the message than the messenger, I would have liked to have heard more about Baldwin’s personal life. Sure, we heard about his reasoning for emigrating to the continent (Paris released him from “a real social danger visible in the face of every cop, every boss, everybody”) and his subsequent return (he missed “that way when a dark face opens the light seems to go everywhere”). But his homosexuality, which along with his race and tough Harlem upbringing was such an integral part of his character, was only referenced once – in print.

That said, I Am Not Your Negro is a cracking documentary which asks as many questions of its viewers as it provides answers. The final warnings of which are two-fold: people who are deprived participation in the American Dream will by their very presence wreck it; and people who acquiesce to lynchings, derogatory slurs, segregation and keeping others in the ghetto will, as night follows day, become monsters themselves. But on a lighter note, any guy who elevates the “subterranean” Ray Charles over the “grotesque” Doris Day is my kind of guy!

Video courtesy of: Magnolia Pictures

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Peter Callaghan
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