I Am Not Your Negro

I suspect that all these stories are designed to reassure us that no crime was committed. We’ve made a legend out of a massacre. 

Baldwin reflects on the American western film and how it misrepresents history, erasing the truth that White settlers unjustifiably massacred Native Americans. Baldwin goes on to connect the treatment of Native Americans to the treatment of Black Americans and uses this as a jumping off point to discuss how Americans misunderstand their own history and culture. 

I had to accept, as time wore on, that part of my responsibility—as a witness— was to move as largely and freely as possible, to write the story, and to get it out. 

While riding along with Medgar Evers, Baldwin realizes that he is less immediately involved with the fight for civil rights than some of the activists and organizers he knows. Baldwin makes peace with this, realizing that his role as a writer is to document and move on. This is a large part of the theme for this section. 

White people are astounded by Birmingham. Black people aren’t. White people are endlessly demanding to be reassured that Birmingham is really on mars. They don’t want to believe still less to on the belief, that what is happening in Birmingham is happening all over the country. They don’t want to realize that there is not one step, morally or actually, between Birmingham and Los Angeles. 

This passage touches on multiple large themes in the text. Baldwin believes that America is divided into two completely separate spheres and that residents of “White America” avoid looking closely at “Black America.” Baldwin’s argument that the protests and injustices in Birmingham also exist in the rest of America helps to solidify this point and also demonstrates that most people, as Baldwin claims, prefer fiction that does not really reflect reality. 

That is Malcolm’s great authority over any in his audience. He corroborates their reality. He tells them that they really exist, you know. 

Baldwin presents Malcolm X as a figure of tremendous strength and authority. He does this partially by describing his physical presence, but in this passage, he also explains part of X’s emotional appeal. This ties into Baldwin’s belief that Black Americans possess experiences that White people do not witness or understand and that these are the experiences around which Black Americans will organize. 

I’m terrified at the oral apathy, the death of the heart which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human. And I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become in themselves moral monsters. 

Baldwin says, here, that racism has corrupted white people; though it gives them power, it also makes them morally monstrous. He believes that segregation has made it possible for White people to avoid understanding the effects of individual and structural racism—and that even when the opportunity arises, White people would prefer not to see or address how Black people suffer under White supremacy. This willfull ignorance and lack of moral courage is a corroding force and a way in which racism ends up corroding White people even as it ensures their place in the social order. 

The question is really a kind of apathy and ignorance, which is the price we pay for segregation. That’s what segregating means. You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall, because you don’t want to know. 

Baldwin furthers his exploration of the mental and emotional consequences of segregation. He sees segregation as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: The less Black and White people have to do with one another in their lives, the farther apart they exist emotionally. This destroys the possibility for emotional connection and leads to apathy.

In America, I was free only in battle, never free to rest—and he who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle… And a young, White revolutionary remains, in general, far more romantic than a Black one.

Baldwin has a complex relationship with America. He feels the need to come home to stand beside and bear witness to Black activists, but he also recognizes that moments of liberation within activism and the fight for civil rights do not actually accumulate to an overall liberation. America offers, for Baldwin, no possibility for rest—and even if he were to throw himself into the civil rights battle completely, as a Black man he wouldn’t be celebrated for his sacrifice.

But what one does realize is that when you try to stand up and look the world in the face like you had a right to be here, you have attacked the entire power structure of the Western world. 

Thinking about the reception toward activism, Baldwin points out America’s hypocrisy. Despite boasting values of freedom and liberation, America relies on the subjugation of Black people. When Black people demand liberation, acting with self-assurance and self-worth, they are perceived as inherently threatening.

It is not a racial problem. It is a problem of whether or not you’re willing to look at your life and be responsible for it, and then begin to change it. That great Western house I come from is one house, and I am one of the children of that house. Simply, I am the most despised child of that house. And it is because the American people are unable to face the fact that I am flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone, created by them. My blood, my father’s blood, is in that soil. 

Baldwin rejects the notion that the racist turmoil and oppression in America derives from the existence of race or from the existence of Black people. In this passage, he asserts that the real problem is with White hatred and White people’s unwillingness to accept that Black people deserve rights in America by virtue of being human. 

I know very well that my ancestors had no desire to come to this place. But neither did the ancestors of the people who became White and who require of my captivity a song. They require a song of my loss to celebrate my captivity than to justify their own. 

This passage highlight’s Baldwin’s understanding of race as a social construct, as he implicitly acknowledges that the ancestors of White people might not have been considered White at the time. Additionally, Baldwin here points out that oppression doesn’t exist solely as a way for certain groups to exercise hatred at a subjugated group; it also helps to justify and validate the existing social stratification.

The problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made them criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them. 

Baldwin repeatedly describes White people as monstrous, explaining that they have become monsters through their dedication to a race problem of their own invention. He points to racism as a way of safeguarding purity for White people by creating a dehumanized class of people who can be represented as impure by comparison. This notion of purity connects to the idea that White innocents (particularly women) must be protected from Black people, a pretext for anti-Black violence. 

The root of the Black man’s hatred is rage, and he does not so much hate White men as simply wants them out of his way, and, more than that, out of his children’s way. The root of White man’s hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on the dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind. 

Baldwin again underscores the idea that Black American and White American experience are completely separate, and that White Americans have no conception of this difference. This passage is notable because it goes beyond highlighting the difference and goes into part of what actually constitutes this difference—Black anger at the existence of oppression and White fear that White supremacy might not last forever.

In spite of the fabulous myths proliferating in this country concerning the sexuality of Black people, Black men are still used, in the popular culture, as though they had no sexual equipment at all. 

Baldwin recognizes the racist contradictions presented by American pop culture. In social and political spheres, Black men are presented as sexually dangerous, butpop culture’s aim is generally to comfort and pacify White audiences, so Black men are represented as being completely sexless. This contradiction shows how racism manifests in both fiction and reality, and how illogical and inconsistent racism can be.

I am aware that men do not kiss each other in American films, nor for the most part, in America, nor do the Black detective and White sheriff kiss here. But the obligatory fade-out kiss, in the classic American film, did not speak of love, and, still less, of sex; it spoke of reconciliation, of all things now becoming possible.

A gay man and the author of multiple books featuring gay characters and relationships, Baldwin has insight into the way love between men is represented, expressed, and repressed in pop culture. He does not, however, consider the “fade-out kiss” (or, alternatively, a non-physical affectionate moment between two men) at the end of a film as a pure expression of interpersonal emotion. Instead, he suggests that this moment symbolizes racial understanding and harmony, which is itself a misrepresentation of reality. 

She was far safer walking the streets alone than when walking with me—a brutal and humiliating fact which thoroughly destroyed whatever relationship this girl and I might have been able to achieve. This happens all the time in America, but Americans have yet to realize what a sinister fact this is, and what it says about them. 

Baldwin tells the story of his friendship with a White woman, and how that friendship was destroyed by segregation and the threat of racist violence. This story is an important illustration of Baldwin’s claim that racism is emotionally and morally damaging to White people.

Someone once said to me that the people in general cannot bear very much reality. He meant by this that they prefer fantasy to the truthful re-creation of their experience. 

This passage acts as an important key to understanding how Baldwin thinks about pop culture, and particularly cinema. By putting forward the idea that most people look for escapism rather than reality, Baldwin primes the reader to begin considering how and why film often misrepresents society.

And that sounded like a very emancipated statement, I suppose, to White people. They were not in Harlem when this statement was greeted. From the point of view of the man in the Harlem barbershop, Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday and now he’s already on his way to the presidency. We’ve been here for four hundred years and now he tells us that maybe in forty years, if you’re good, we may let you become president.

In this statement, Baldwin responds to President Kennedy’s comments about the progress of the Black community. Baldwin reframes Kennedy’s comments, pointing out how condescending and demeaning they are to the Black community. This underscores the difference between how Americans of different races perceive the fight for equal rights—and how White people twist history to make their own supremacy appear justified. 

It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of its population is beneath them. And until that moment, until the moment comes that we the Americans, we the American people, are able to accept the fact that I have to accept, for example, that my ancestors are both White and Black, that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other, and that I am not a ward of American, I am not an object of missionary charity. I am one of the people who built the country. Until this moment, there is scarcely any hope for the American dream, because people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it. And if that happens, it is a very grave moment for the West.

In this section, Baldwin lays out the moral imperative for America to address its racism. By pointing out that Black people are integral to America and have been since its founding, and not “wards” or objects of charity, Baldwin makes it clear how President Kennedy’s comments and other expressions of supposed White generosity are preposterous, condescending, and ahistorical. 

But, you know, when the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles, or the Irish, or any White man in the world says “give me liberty, or give me death,” the entire world applauds. When a Black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad n***** so there won’t be any more like him.

Baldwin points out the racist hypocrisy that surrounds White alarmism about the civil rights movement, and White alarmism regarding any moment in which Black people demand equality. This is one of the clearest statements in the text on the double standard of expectation facing Black and White Americans. It is also an instance of Baldwin using the n-word to help explain White construction of the dehumanized black figure.

The industry is compelled, given the way it is built, to present to the American people a self-perpetuating fantasy of American life. Their concept of entertainment is difficult to distinguish from the use of narcotics. 

In this passage, Baldwin comments on the state of American cinema. This statement adds to his suggestion that most Americans don’t want to see reality reflected in pop culture, and takes the logic a step further. Not only do Americans tend to prefer escapism to reality, this escapism also deadens them to their actual environment and acts like a pacifying drug.

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.

This passage is Baldwin’s rebuttal to White Philosophy professor Paul Weiss, who claims Baldwin is overemphasizing racial divisions. Baldwin’s response works to contradict an argument that acknowledging and addressing racism is a distraction from Black advancement in America. Baldwin forcefully points out that that quibbling over whether or not the average White person is racist is insultingly reductive, when the effects of racism shape every moment of reality for both White and Black Americans.

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. 

This statement from Baldwin succinctly hits three of the text’s major themes: the separation of White and Black America; the way in which racism and segregation make White people into monsters; and the importance of bearing witness. 

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 the country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. 

Despite the atrocities and losses Baldwin has witnessed and experienced, he argues that optimism is a necessary quality to maintain productive antiracist work. By saying that pessimism reduces life to an “academic matter,” Baldwin is suggesting that life should not be pessimistically evaluated as if it’s an abstract concept. He acknowledges the reality of people’s lived experience and believes that, without hope, there is no reason to fight for a better future.