In 1979 an idea was born in the mind of James Baldwin. In a letter he explained to his agent that his next project, titled “Remember This House,” was going to encompass meetings with three of his closest friends: Medgar Evers (1925-1963), Malcolm X (1925-1965), and Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968). At the time of his death in 1987, Baldwin left behind an unfinished 30-page manuscript. With the documentary I Am Not Your Negro (2016), filmmaker Raoul Peck seeks a kind of closure for the unfinished work.

For months the world went numb. Just like in the best science fiction movies, a deadly virus changed life as we knew it. The news only showed numbers of infected and dead, there was no room for anything else, until May 25, 2020. In the morning hours of that May day in the city of Minneapolis, an arrest turned into a murder. For 8 minutes and 46 seconds, police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of the detained George Floyd. Floyd’s death sparked a series of protests across the United States. Police brutality and racism were the dose of reality that changed our script from science fiction to drama.

There are viruses that have never left us, we have been systematically inoculated and they have adhered to our DNA. The character of Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception (2010), says at the beginning of the film that an idea is the most resilient thing there is. They are highly contagious and once they infect the brain, they are almost impossible to eradicate. This is where the essence of Baldwin’s speech and the narrative line that Peck’s documentary embraces lies.

Paying my debts

Unlike his friends who served and died in the trenches, Baldwin faced no opposition on the battlefield. Born in Harlem, New York, he emigrated to Paris at the age of 24 and it was not until the summer of 1957 that he would return to the United States. Civil rights legislation was being debated in Congress and a photo of a young African American girl arriving at a white school moved the writer and made him return home. His task, which he assumed with stoic rigor, was to document and perpetuate the work of those three friends that hatred tore from his hands.

It’s a big surprise, around the age of five, six or seven, to find out that Gary Cooper is killing the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you.

The voice-over becomes the protagonist in I Am Not Your Negro. The narrative is built with phrases from Baldwin himself and with some fragments of the novel that he never finished. The voice resource that accompanies the stock images and videos is used precisely and is never redundant. Hearing Samuel L. Jackson abound as the footage progresses makes us better contextualize the story. Without falling into the realm of empty rhetoric or didactic talks, Raoul Peck shows us the ins and outs of one of the most complex problems facing humanity.

The great editing work of Alexandra Strauss (The Raft) makes the large amount of information and the constant jumps in time digestible. From journalistic narration, we move on to moments of sublime poetry. The changes in rhythm in the tone of the narrative allow us to decode the story as a three-act story and we can feel the momentum that drives the climax of the final act.

It is not a racial problem

It’s a problem of whether or not you are willing to look at your life and be responsible for it, and then start to change it.

If the death of George Floyd has taught us anything, it is that we have learned nothing. An act of barbarism takes us back to the time of lynchings. Segregation has mutated and is no longer defined by a separate space on buses or in restaurants. Now it is perfected and disguised as equality, those who run the system continue to find ways to marginalize certain groups and use them according to their interests.

I Am Not Your Negro will prevail as a document of incalculable historical value. The social weight of James Baldwin’s vision becomes more important when we understand that his gaze is filtered through an anthropological glass. Just like the work of the American novelist, Raoul Peck’s documentary does not seek to establish positions, but rather to analyze the causes and define a concrete path to seek solutions.

The arts complement each other and cinema has always been nourished by literature. In this particular case, cinema has served to complete a piece that was not finished being born.