After just seeing the documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro" (alone in a 92 seat theater)

[mnhtnbb]

I highly recommend it. It is an astonishing piece of work.

From a NY Times review of the movie:

Whatever you think about the past and future of what used to be called “race relations” — white supremacy and the resistance to it, in plainer English — this movie will make you think again, and may even change your mind. Though its principal figure, the novelist, playwright and essayist James Baldwin, is a man who has been dead for nearly 30 years, you would be hard-pressed to find a movie that speaks to the present moment with greater clarity and force, insisting on uncomfortable truths and drawing stark lessons from the shadows of history.

To call “I Am Not Your Negro” a movie about James Baldwin would be to understate Mr. Peck’s achievement. It’s more of a posthumous collaboration, an uncanny and thrilling communion between the filmmaker — whose previous work includes both a documentary and a narrative feature about the Congolese anti-colonialist leader Patrice Lumumba — and his subject. The voice-over narration (read by Samuel L. Jackson) is entirely drawn from Baldwin’s work. Much of it comes from notes and letters written in the mid-1970s, when Baldwin was somewhat reluctantly sketching out a book, never to be completed, about the lives and deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

Baldwin could not have known about Ferguson and Black Lives Matter, about the presidency of Barack Obama and the recrudescence of white nationalism in its wake, but in a sense he explained it all in advance. He understood the deep, contradictory patterns of our history, and articulated, with a passion and clarity that few others have matched, the psychological dimensions of racial conflict: the suppression of black humanity under slavery and Jim Crow and the insistence on it in African-American politics and art; the dialectic of guilt and rage, forgiveness and denial that distorts relations between black and white citizens in the North as well as the South; the lengths that white people will go to wash themselves clean of their complicity in oppression.

A former child preacher, he remained a natural, if somewhat reluctant, performer — a master of the heavy sigh, the raised eyebrow and the rhetorical flourish. At one point, on “The Dick Cavett Show,” Baldwin tangles with Paul Weiss, a Yale philosophy professor who scolds him for dwelling so much on racial issues. The initial spectacle of mediocrity condescending to genius is painful, but the subsequent triumph of self-taught brilliance over credentialed ignorance is thrilling to witness.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/movies/review-i-am-not-your-negro-review-james-baldwin.html



It is not a coincidence that on the night of Obama's inauguration, Republicans were having a four hour dinner plotting opposition to EVERYTHING
that Obama would propose. From a WP article https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/republicans-had-it-in-for-obama-before-day-1/2012/08/10/0c96c7c8-e31f-11e1-ae7f-d2a13e249eb2_blog.html

Vice President Joe Biden told the author (“The New New Deal” by Grunwald) that during the transition, “seven different Republican Senators” told him that “McConnell had demanded unified resistance.” This was after the 2008 election but before Obama and Biden took office.

“The way it was characterized to me was: `For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,’ ” Biden says.

Nevermind the nation was falling off the fiscal cliff. Nevermind the global economic system was hanging in the balance. Nevermind we were on the verge of another Great Depression. When the nation needed single-minded focus, the Republican political establishment put power over the national interest.

Yes, the Republicans put white power over the national interest.


I don't think it's a coincidence that the white supremacist, fascist leaning, racist Trump emerged as the Republican front runner from the pack of Republicans last year. It's certainly not a coincidence that a guy like Bannon is at the right hand of Trump in the White House. The election of Trump is not about unskilled, poorly educated white people in middle America feeling left out from the recovery of the disaster of the Bush years: it is about racism and putting people of color back in their place.

Go see the movie.

[Chiquitita]

1. Yes, it is a must see and will change the way you think

Then run to your nearest library or bookstore and get some prophetic James Baldwin to read. I read his essay The Fire Next Time and I felt like he was showing us the clear path. Like a vision.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

2. Saw it at the Laemmle's NoHo 7 . It was about 3/4 full. I guess it depends when.

[mnhtnbb]

3. I admit it was a 10 am showing--but here in our liberal, college town--I am often not alone

when I go to the first show at our newest theater which also has senior discounts and plush leather seating.

There are plenty of retired, liberal white folks (like me) who go to these first shows for the discount pricing.

I was surprised to be alone.

[HoneyBadger]

4. I saw it on a Sunday in Harlem

At least half full. Very interesting person. Baldwin was not a joiner. He had issues with all of the black leaders and their agendas, so he created his own path. The response to the insight about the Kennedy aspirations was quite enjoyable while seated in Harlem.

[heaven05]

5. this nt

[msongs]

6. when I saw the moving "Twister" I was the only one in the place very cool experience. no cell

phone users in those days