PAUL WEISS: I disagreed with a great deal of it…of course, there’s a good deal I agree with. But I think he’s overlooking one very important matter, I think. Each one of us, I think, is terribly alone. He lives his own individual life. He has all kinds of obstacles in the way of religion or color or size or shape or lack of ability, and the problem is to become a man.
JAMES BALDWIN: But what I was discussing was not that problem, really. I was discussing the difficulties, the obstacles, the very real danger of death thrown up by the society when a Negro, when a black man attempts to become a man.
PAUL WEISS: All this emphasis upon black man and white does emphasize something which is here, but it emphasizes, or perhaps exaggerates it and therefore makes us put people together in groups which they ought not to be in. I have more in common with a black scholar than I have with a white man who is against scholarship. And you have more in common with a white author than you have with someone who is against all literature. So why must we always concentrate on color? Or religion? Or this? There are other ways of connecting men.
JAMES BALDWIN: I’ll tell you this: when I left this country in 1948, I left this country for one reason only, one reason—I didn’t care where I went. I might’ve gone to Hong Kong, I might have gone to Timbuktu. I ended up in Paris, on the streets of Paris, with forty dollars in my pocket on the theory that nothing worse could happen to me there than had already happened to me here. You talk about making it as a writer by yourself, you have to be able then to turn off all the antennae with which you live, because once you turn your back on this society you may die. You may die. And it’s very hard to sit at a typewriter and concentrate on that if you are afraid of the world around you. The years I lived in Paris did one thing for me: they released me from that particular social terror, which was not the paranoia of my own mind, but a real social danger visible in the face of every cop, every boss, everybody.
PAUL WEISS: Not all…
JAMES BALDWIN: I don’t know what most white people in this country feel. But I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions. I don’t know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know we have a Christian church which is white and a Christian church which is black. I know, as Malcolm X once put it, the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday. That says a great deal for me about a Christian nation. It means I can’t afford to trust most white Christians, and I certainly cannot trust the Christian church. I don’t know whether the labor unions and their bosses really hate me—that doesn’t matter—but I know I’m not in their union. I don’t know whether the real estate lobby has anything against black people, but I know the real estate lobby is keeping me in the ghetto. I don’t know if the board of education hates black people, but I know the textbooks they give my children to read and the schools we have to go to. Now, this is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my wife, my woman, my sister, my children on some idealism which you assure me exists in America, which I have never seen.
All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie,
the lie of their pretended humanism;
this means that their history
has no moral justification,
and that the West has no moral authority.
“Vile as I am,” states one of the characters
in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot,
“I don’t believe in the wagons that bring bread
to humanity. For the wagons that bring bread
to humanity…may coldly exclude a considerable
part of humanity from enjoying what is brought.”
For a very long time, America prospered:
this prosperity cost millions of people their lives.
Now, not even the people who are the most
spectacular recipients of the benefits of this
prosperity are able to endure these benefits:
they can neither understand them
nor do without them.
Above all, they cannot imagine the price paid
by their victims, or subjects, for this way of life,
and so they cannot afford to know
why the victims are revolting.
This is a formula for a nation’s or a kingdom’s
decline, for no kingdom can maintain
itself by force alone.
Force does not work the way
its advocates think in fact it does.
It does not, for example, reveal to the victim
the strength of the adversary.
On the contrary, it reveals the weakness,
even the panic of the adversary
and this revelation invests the victim with patience.
Credit 27
There is a day in Palm Springs
that I will remember forever,
a bright day.
I was based in Hollywood, working on the
screen version of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
This was a difficult assignment, since I had known
Malcolm, after all, crossed swords with him,
worked with him, and held him in that great
esteem which is not easily distinguishable,
if it is distinguishable, from love.
Billy Dee Williams had come to town,
and he was staying at the house.
I very much wanted Billy Dee
for the role of Malcolm.
The phone had been brought out to the pool,
and now it rang.
And I picked it up.
The record player was still playing.
“He’s not dead yet, but it’s a head wound.”
Credit 28
ROBERT KENNEDY: I have some very sad news for all of you and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world. And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight.
I hardly remember the rest of the evening at all.
I remember weeping, briefly,
more in helpless rage than in sorrow,
and Billy trying to comfort me.
But I really don’t remember that evening at all.
The church was packed.
In the pew before me sat Marlon Brando,
Sammy Davis, Eartha Kitt. Sidney Poitier nearby.
I saw Harry Belafonte sitting next to Coretta King.
I have a childhood hangover thing
about not weeping in public,
Credit 29
and I was concentrating on holding myself together.
I did not want to weep for Martin;
tears seemed futile.
But I may also have been afraid,
and I could not have been the only one,
that if I began to weep, I would not be able to stop.
I started to cry, and I stumbled.
Sammy grabbed my arm.
The story of the Negro in America
is the story of America.
It is not a pretty story.
What can we do?
Well, I am tired….
I don’t know how it will come about.
I know that no matter how it comes about,
it will be bloody;
it will be hard.
I still believe that we can do with this country
something that has not been done before.
We are misled here because we think of numbers.
You don’t need numbers; you need passion.
And this is proven by the history of the world.
The tragedy is that most of the people
who say they care about it do not care.
What they care about is their safety and their profits.
The American way of life has failed—
to make people happier or make them better.
We do not want to admit this,
and we do not admit it.
We persist in believing that
the empty and criminal among o
ur children
Credit 30
are the result of some miscalculation
in the formula that can be corrected;
that the bottomless and aimless hostility
which makes our cities among the most dangerous
in the world is created, and felt,
by a handful of aberrants;
that the lack, yawning everywhere in this country,
of passionate conviction, of personal authority,
proves only our rather appealing tendency
to be gregarious and democratic.
Credit 31
To look around the United States today
is enough to make prophets and angels weep.
This is not the land of the free;
it is only very unwillingly and sporadically
the home of the brave.
Credit 32
I sometimes feel it to be an absolute miracle
that the entire black population of the United States
of America has not long ago
succumbed to raging paranoia.
People finally say to you,
in an attempt to dismiss the social reality,
“But you’re so bitter!”
Well, I may or may not be bitter,
but if I were, I would have good reasons for it:
chief among them that American blindness,
or cowardice, which allows us to pretend
that life presents no reasons for being bitter.
Credit 33
In this country,
for a dangerously long time,
there have been two levels of experience.
One, to put it cruelly, can be summed up
in the images of Gary Cooper and Doris Day:
two of the most grotesque appeals
to innocence the world has ever seen.
And the other,
subterranean, indispensable, and denied,
can be summed up, let us say,
in the tone and in the face of Ray Charles.
Credit 34
RAY CHARLES, “WHAT’D I SAY”
Hey mama, don’t you treat me wrong
Come and love your daddy all night long
All right, all is right now, I know it’s all right, hey hey hey
When you see me in misery
Come on baby, see about me.
And there has never been any genuine confrontation
between these two levels of experience.
Credit 35
DORIS DAY, “SHOULD I SURRENDER” FROM LOVER COME BACK - 1961 -
Should I be bad or nice?
Should I surrender?
His pleading words so tenderly entreat me.
Is this the night that love finally defeats me?
Credit 36
You cannot lynch me
and keep me in ghettos
without becoming something monstrous yourselves.
And furthermore, you give me a terrifying advantage.
You never had to look at me.
I had to look at you.
I know more about you than you know about me.
Not everything that is faced can be changed;
but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
I AM NOT A NIGGER
History is not the past.
It is the present.
We carry our history with us.
We are our history.
If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals.
I attest to this:
the world is not white;
it never was white,
cannot be white.
White is a metaphor for power,
and that is simply a way of describing
Chase Manhattan Bank.
THE NEGRO AND THE AMERICAN PROMISE - 1963 -
JAMES BALDWIN: I can’t be a pessimist, because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive. But the Negro in this country…the future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people and our representatives—it is entirely up to the American people whether or not they are going to face and deal with and embrace this stranger who they have maligned so long. 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. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….If I’m not the nigger here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.
Credit 37
CREDITS
I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO
(93 min. USA/France/Belgium/Switzerland)
Directed by Raoul Peck
Written by James Baldwin,
compiled and edited by Raoul Peck
Narrated by Samuel L. Jackson
Producers: Rémi Grellety, Raoul Peck, Hébert Peck
Coproducers: Patrick Quinet, Joëlle Bertossa
With the full support and collaboration
of the James Baldwin Estate
Editor: Alexandra Strauss
Cinematography: Henry Adebonojo, Bill Ross,
Turner Ross
Animator: Michel Blustein
Sound: Valérie Le Docte, David Gillain
Music: Alexei Aigui
Archival research: Marie-Hélène Barbéris,
assisted by Nolwenn Gouault
ARTE France: Fabrice Puchault, Alex Szalat
Executive Producers for ITVS: Sally Jo Fifer, Lois Vossen
Executive Producer for NBPC: Leslie Fields-Cruz
Produced by Velvet Film, Inc. (USA), Velvet Film
(France), Artémis Productions, Close Up Films
In coproduction with ARTE France, Independent Television Service (ITVS) with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), RTS Radio Télévision Suisse, RTBF (Télévision belge), Shelter Prod
With the support of Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée, MEDIA Programme of the European Union, Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program, National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC), Cinereach, PROCIREP—Société des Producteurs, ANGOA, Taxshelter.be, ING, Tax Shelter Incentive of the Federal Government of Belgium, Cinéforom, Loterie Romande
Sales Agents: ICM Partners, Wide House
BIBLIOGRAPHY
James Baldwin’s works used for the narration of I Am Not Your Negro:
“As Much Truth As One Can Bear.” New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1962. Collected in The Cross of Redemption.
“Black English: A Dishonest Argument.” In Black English and the Education of Black Children and Youth: Proceedings of the National Invitational Symposium on the King Decision. Detroit: Center for Black Studies, Wayne State University, 1980. Collected in The Cross of Redemption.
The Cross of Redemption. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010.
The Devil Finds Work. New York: Vintage Books, 1976, 2011.
Letter from James Baldwin to Jay Acton, June 30, 1979. In “Notes Toward Remember This House,” October 28, 1980.
“Lorraine Hansberry at the Summit.” Freedomways, no. 19 (1979): 269–72. Collected in The Cross of Redemption.
“Mass Culture and the Creative Artist: Some Personal Notes.” In Culture for the Millions: Mass Media in Modern Society, edited by Norman Jacobs. Princeton, N. J.: Van Nostrand, 1959. Collected in The Cross of Redemption.
From Nationalism, Colonialism, and the United States:
One Minute to 12! A Forum Sponsored by the Liberation Committee for Africa on Its First Anniversary Celebration, June 2, 1961. New York: Photo-Offset Press, 1961. Collected in The Cross of Redemption.
“The News from All the Northern Cities Is, to Understate It, Grim; the State of the Union Is Catastrophic.” New York Times, April 5, 1978. Collected in The Cross of Redemption.
No Name in the Street. New York: Vintage Books, 1972.
“Sidney Poitier.” Look, July 23, 1968. Collected in The Cross of Redemption.
“The White Problem.” In 100 Years of Emancipation, edited by Robert A. Goodwin. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964. Collected in The Cross of Redemption.
PERMISSIONS
Permission to reprint the words of James Baldwin is granted by The James Baldwin Estate.
Lyrics from “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” Bob Dylan, copyright © 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1996 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.
Lyrics from “What’d I Say,” words and music by Ray Charles, copyright © 1959 (renewed) by Unichappell Music and Mijac Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music. Copyright © Hal Leonard Corporation. Reprinted by permission.
Lyrics from “Should I Surrender,” music by Adam Ross, lyrics by William Landan, copyright © 1962 by Big Sur Music, BMI.
ILLUSTRATIONS
1 Malcolm X (Burt Shavitz/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)
2 Martin Luther King, Jr., with family (pam koner-yohai/Corbis Premium Historical/Getty Images)
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