I Am Not Your Negro

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 nigger in the first place. Because I'm not a nigger; I'm a man. But if you think I'm a nigger, 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.