Name: I Am Not Your Negro
ISBN: 9780141986678

James Baldwin

In June 1979, the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin embarked on a project to tell the story of America through the lives of three of his murdered friends : Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. He died before it could be completed. In his documentary film I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck imagines the book Baldwin never wrote, using his original words to create a radical, powerful and poetic work on race in the United States — then, and today.

I Am Not Your Negro

Raoul Peck

Transcript of the documentary film I am not your Negro, composed of unpublished and published writings, interviews, and letters by James Baldwin on the subject of racism in America.

A Major Motion Picture Directed by Raoul Peck

This book is a James Baldwin fever dream. Beautiful, sad, uplifting all at once. 

Krys C

4,5 stars - read this while "watching" the movie. WIthout the movie, the book is confusing

Joy KBA

eve 

I will forever cherish Baldwin’s mind, his work, the urgency, as a witness but also the bearer, to tell the real story.
-
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 him.

Rose Stanley

My fault for not reading the blurb on this one - thought it was a completed Baldwin. 
Powerful stuff nonetheless. 
Anyway, obv I now need to 
1. watch the documentary
2. read more Baldwin

Sameer Vasta

I have yet to watch Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, the critically-acclaimed documentary on James Baldwin released last year, but if the collection of Baldwin’s writing that inspired the documentary—captured in the I Am Not Your Negro collection—is any indication, it is a documentary that needs to be seen by everyone.

Reading Baldwin’s 
  I Am Not Your Negro
 was sobering and powerful. After the events of Charlottesville a few weeks ago, when I heard people proclaim “this is not the America I know,” I was reminded of this passage in the book:

White people are astounded by Birmingham.

Black people aren’t.

White people are endlessly demanding to be

reassured that Birmingham is really on Mars.

They don’t want to believe,

still less to act on the belief,

that what is happening in Birmingham

is happening all over the country.

They don’t want to realize that there is not one step,

morally or actually, between

Birmingham and Los Angeles.

This is, in fact, the America so many of us know.

When I hear that so many people have never met a black person, or a Muslim, or a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I am often astounded; I shouldn’t be, but it still comes as a surprise. I sometimes forget that not everyone had the luck and opportunity to go to school with people of various backgrounds—racial, ethnic, socio-demographic, etc.—and to forge deep friendships with them.

I think of the question often: is the lack of connection with “the other” because of a lack of access, or just a lack of desire? This passage in 
  I Am Not Your Negro
 was resonant:

Most of the white Americans I’ve ever encountered, really, you know, had a Negro friend or a Negro maid or somebody in high school, but they never, you know, or rarely, after school was over or whatever came into my kitchen, you know. We were segregated from the schoolhouse door. Therefore, he doesn’t know, he really does not know, what it was like for me to leave my house, you know, to leave the school and go back to Harlem. He doesn’t know how Negroes live. And it comes as a great surprise to the Kennedy brothers and to everybody else in the country. I’m certain, again, you know…that again like most white Americans I have encountered, they have no…I’m sure they have nothing whatever against Negroes, but that’s really not the question, you know. The question is really a kind of apathy and ignorance, which is the price we pay for segregation. That’s what segregation means. You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall, because you don’t want to know.

Worth repeating: “That’s what segregation means. You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall, because you don’t want to know.”

Read this book. Without any hyperbole, it will change the way you think about the world.

(originally posted on inthemargins.ca)