I Am Not Your Negro Review

The first thing to do before watching the brave documentary film I'm Not Your Black is to ask yourself a question: why does a film like this still exist on the billboard today? One would like to think that in 2017 it would not really be necessary to review the problems that plagued humanity fifty, one hundred, two hundred years ago . Except for those that are related to indefensible concepts and that many of us considered –or wanted to consider– anachronistic, such as intolerance, racism, discrimination. But then comes Raoul Peck , a Haitian man, black, political scientist and sympathizer of the left to stamp a cake of reality on our faces and rip us out of our ridiculous intellectual onanism.

The film I Am Not Your Black deserves to be included in the same list as the documentaries by Joshua Oppenheimer ( The Act of Killing , The Look of Silence ), Errol Morris ( The Fog of War ) and other crude cinematographic pieces that show –and denounce– the disconcerting fickleness of the human condition. In the case of Peck's film, the tour guide is a man that probably ninety-five percent of the audience have never heard of. To begin with, it is about a dead man –he died in 1987– to whom Samuel L. Jackson lends the sound of his unmistakable voice, and as if that were not enough, and despite being a brilliant thinker –which is clear just after the first five minutes of the footage – the corpusof his work ended up lost in time for reasons that we will not fully understand, so inexplicable that anyone related to conspiracy theories would say that they were disappearing on purpose.

In any case, the recovered words of James Baldwin, which is how this man with a powerful mind was called, in combination with the visual scheme selected by Peck –sometimes archive images of the writer himself– put together this kind of cartography with great efficiency. philosophy of blackness, specifically, of what it has meant to be a black individual in the United States since the days when slavery began.

His vision even dares to go further and turn the hood on the matter, that is, he is also capable of questioning the meaning of being white within a society where those who have a different skin color are minimized, beaten, segregated. Or as Baldwin would put it in his own words: "what lies at the root of the American Negro problem is the white man's need to find a way to live with the Negro so that he can live with himself." Himself a victim of discrimination not only because of his race but also because of his homosexuality, Baldwin lived for nearly a decade in France, where he studied and began writing his first texts.

Upon returning to the United States in 1957, he immediately joined the civil rights struggle that was taking place throughout the country. Thanks to his talent and wisdom, he soon became close and well known among the leading activists: Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, all of whom were assassinated while Baldwin was writing essays about the vision that each of them had. they possessed and the way in which their opinion matched or differed from their own.

Several of these reflections work as a counterpoint in the film I'm not your blackwhich, unfortunately, and as we have already mentioned, is perceived as too current. The Ferguson riots, Donald Trump's ascension to power and other political and social phenomena that have taken place around the world –and that were thought to never return– would have to dissuade us from feeding our cinephilia only with films belonging to the field of fiction and give space to those of another type, even if their sighting causes us discomfort. As a certain philosopher would once say: “in life you certainly shouldn't be a pessimist, but you should be an optimist with information” and in that sense the film works as a favor. As a service. For the same reason, his Oscar nomination, although certainly deserved, is also the least relevant when making a general balance of what this film represents. Of what it means.