#race_representation

“I am not your Negro and other texts/films”

I interpreted the documentary “I am not your Negro,” as an essayistic film that except for only surveying the civil rights movement in America and the failure of its system, also tackles the issue of a black person’s identity and how this is shaped, reflected, and viewed by the American Society.

Identity and history are constantly shaped and re-shaped by society and its surrounding environment. In the case of America, James Baldwin states that “The Story of the negro in America is the story of America,”  and “we carry our history with us. If we pretend otherwise, we are criminals.” I understood the above quotes as an effort to talk about America’s failure to resolve or even represent and accept its shameful history of racial inequality and proceed to steps about making social justice visible. Based on the film, Baldwin suggests that social justice and history must be first be seen and accepted as it is and then proceed to steps towards “resolving” any issue.

Other parts of the film that made me replay it and think twice were this phrase from Baldwin:

“The world is not white; it was never white. White is a metaphor of power.”  James Baldwin also stated that he was not a “nigger,” but he was a man, and if one thought that he was indeed a “nigger,” that meant that one needs to use this term to describe his, one needs to figure out why. He concludes that the future of America depends on this very fact. The above statements made me think about why one needs hateful terms to describe or better identify a black person. After reading the texts and watching the other films for todays’ class (e.g., Vision and Justice), I realized that an individual is identifying a black person as a negro instead of a man is because of the racial representation in the media. Baldwin wrote extensively about cultural criticism, including many essays on racial representation in cinema.  

To close this short response, I am adding here a phrase from Baldwin that stood out for me but I have not understood entirely. He stated that “I can’t be a pessimist, because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means you have agreed that human life I academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist.”

Across the media presented this week, I was drawn to the statement in “Vision & Justice” piece that described Frederick Douglass as a master of visual literacy. There was a particular line that stated that he “understood that the subjectivity of the person of African descent was dependent upon the creation of a self.” This line, as well as I Am Not Your Negro emphasized a lot of how I feel about the over-saturation of Blackness in media, both in the US and globally that only serves to position blackness as striving to be accepted and/or adjacent to whiteness and/or dwelling on Black history as slavery, when slavery is actually more accurately White history, both in the US and globally.

Today, we see the dualities of increased Black faces in the Hollywood alongside increased documented records of ongoing brutality. You can’t see one without the other

Technologies of visibility have a race problem; race itself is a visible construct, or rather, a construct that takes visibility as its medium. This entanglement between race, racism, visibility, and photography — think of the contribution of photography to colonialism and eugenics — calls for a reevaluation of visibility itself, of its techniques and of its meaning. For racism is a distorsion of the visible; it is a twisted phenomenology, a way to look and not see, to stare and not look at. “One was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people,” writes James Baldwin. Baldwin restores the visible to its plenitude, beyond the indigent system of signs that racism is. His stepfather would have loved to take down that picture of Louis Armstrong hanging on the wall; but a female relative forbade him to do so. This was a form of visual education: Baldwin is a close reader of photographs, which allow him to celebrate his stepfather’s “blackness and his beauty” — this stepfather who “knew that he was black but did not know that he was beautiful.” Beauty, beheld in its fullness. Reevaluation of the visible.

But that the visible is so entangled with racism calls for another move: a reevaluation of the other senses as well. What is the point of seeking equal visibility, if visibility is weaponized against us? How might we seek inclusion into mechanisms of surveillance and coercion? into unfair and violent systems? Does it make sense to develop parallel ontologies and ethical modes, whereby touch for instance would become more central to our definition of ourselves, and to our relationship with others? How might we think of a public sphere in which it is no longer the visible that defines us but touch, taken as a polysemic concept, a concept that includes one of the five senses as well as an attention to affect, emotion, and care? “Blackness is also an aesthetic problem,” writes anthropologist Brian Horton. Aesthetic here means not only a theory of beauty but a way of looking, a phenomenological experience that makes beautiful what is desirable and ugly what is undesirable. “Anxieties expressed over individual, communal, and social undoing ... speak in the language of beauty,” also writes Horton. This necessitates another aesthetics altogether, an engagement with the other senses. A counter-aesthetic of touch, taste, sound, and smell. Such is perhaps what Pete Souza’s May 2009 White House photograph is precisely about: showing the limitations of the visible, creating a more tangible connection to power and futurity. Seeing the president, and touching him as well.

References:

James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” in Notes of a Native Son, New York: The Library of America, 1998, p. 63-84.

Brian Horton, “Future Entanglements: Beauty, Fashion, and (Anti-)Black Aesthetics in India,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 8-1 (2021), p. 146–153.

Watching I Am Not Your Negro and having read some of James Baldwin’s writing in the past, I expected the film to resonate, but perhaps not quite as it did. The juxtaposition of Baldwin’s words (narrated by Samuel Jackson) from the 60s and 70s onto footage and stories from today hit different. I couldn’t quite fathom the gravity of what I was watching – I was shocked and disappointed in myself because of that very fact.

The film is essentially a documentary narrating 4 different lives at once. Baldwin himself as well as the three men whose lives and deaths he witnessed: Malcom X, Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers. The timelessness of the film is striking. Though condition may vary the gist of mobilizing people and them evading change persists. It was interesting to witness the difference amongst these men and what is more interesting is what unites them. Though Baldwin does seem like the odd man out in some instances for his “civility” in addressing the white man – perhaps most different from Malcom X – I could notice a subtle but powerful shift in his position specifically after the death of these men. Though I know some of this history, and though it isn’t mine, watching it I was infuriated. It is sometimes easy to forget, disregard or turn a blind eye from things that are “unpleasant” to speak of in society. But this is where our fault lies. Choosing civility and social niceties, opting for being correct and walking on eggshells while tying everything in a big pink ribbon is where we are at fault.

Be it happenstance, coincidence or deliberate, it was certainly more significant to me to watch this film in February and on the anniversary of Malcom X’s assassination. February 21st could not have been easy to people of color then and people of color now. The anger and fear that Baldwin talks about it in his writings is not only warranted but essential. Baldwin’s words ring just as true today as they did back then – dare I say truer today. But watching him deliver those words was remarkable. I recall the scene where he gives a talk in Cambridge and receives a standing ovation, the seeming shock on his face – even as a by then established writer and scholar – was heartbreaking: A black man among a sea of white.