NOW WATCHING: I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO
A few things happened when I left the movie theatre. First, I told anyone who would listen as I exited the theatre that this needed to be required viewing for all, that high schools should immediately get a copy; that young and old people needed to see this. I proceeded to text my friends on several different group text chains, I just had to let as many people as possible know that they needed to see this documentary. Then I may have said something on Twitter or posted on the movie’s Instagram page.
As soon as I got home, on my couch, shoes off, I scrolled to YouTube on my phone and started looking for and watching every single interview, debate, film reel, presentation of James Baldwin. It’s not that any of it was exactly new, but I hadn’t realized just how much of it was so much more applicable today than I would have imagined. James Baldwins words which are the basis of the documentary seem just as relevant now as they were then. That because America has never fully faced it’s history (in all it’s ugliness, brutality etc), it won’t be able to move forward. History is funny like that- you forget…instead of learning and remembering, we forget and so we repeat and repeat and repeat and then we’re surprised by the outcome.
History explains so much about who we are, why we do what we do, why we experience the world the way we do. In brief, run, walk, stroll, it doesn’t really matter- just get to watching “I am not your Negro”.
James Baldwin:
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
