Samuel L. Jackson has played characters with reserved, understated voices, but he is known for the OUTBURST. His gradually rising tone is used to articulate legitimate rage, as in A Time to Kill, or no-nonsense agitation, in Changing Lanes, or comic frustration, as in Pulp Fiction.
In his latest film, Jackson does a turn as the offscreen protagonist’s voice in Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro. In reprising the words of the late writer James Baldwin, Jackson dials down the bombast. It’s a smart choice, since I Am Not Your Negro is all about voice. Whether we hear Baldwin’s own elegant, Euro-inflected (if also affected) accent in footage from his many TV appearances, or Jackson’s uncharacteristically quiet vocal, we’re hearing from someone who understood how to effectively communicate his theories of race and American life in singularly mesmerizing ways. In his career as a novelist, essayist, playwright, and would-be screenwriter, Baldwin found myriad ways of voicing the smoldering pain of black life in white America, in a rhetorical register that was by turns confrontational and simple, complex and theorized, acutely insightful and spiritually urgent. The film puts that versatility on display, while breathing new topical life into Baldwin’s voice and thought.
I Am Not Your Negro also coveys Baldwin’s message in a suitably destabilizing array of images. The film is intercut between past and present, alternating archival footage and photography with contemporary images from Ferguson and other sites of protest. There are short excerpts from Hollywood shlock like Love in the Afternoon and Imitation of Life. This collage-like array of images is held together by Baldwin’s words, spoken by him in clips from television interviews, or read from essays and letters by Jackson.
The movie is loosely organized around notes from an unfinished book Baldwin was working on before his death in 1987. Called Remember This House, it was to be about the lives and deaths of his friends, the assassinated black leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. I Am Not Your Negro uses those notes as an outline, and each man’s death punctuates the chronicle like a dark benchmark. In a letter to his literary agent Jay Acton, Baldwin gives a progress report on the stalled project, noting, “I know how to do it, technically. It is a matter of research, and journeys.” [...]
Throughout I Am Not Your Negro, Baldwin points out the limitations of white obliviousness, be it expressed in the empty status markers of postwar consumerism or the antiseptic chastity of Doris Day and Gary Cooper, whom he calls “two of the most grotesque appeals to innocence the world has ever seen.” One of Baldwin’s most eloquent assaults on unthinking white social presumption comes when he takes aim at the callow color-blind ethos voiced by Yale philosophy professor Paul Weiss. In a joint 1968 appearance with Baldwin on the Dick Cavett Show, Weiss tried to undercut Baldwin’s argument—which he had only heard in part offstage—by appealing to a comically ungrounded model of high-minded Enlightenment dogma. “Why must we always concentrate on color? Or religion? Or this? There are other ways of connecting men,” Weiss asked.
Baldwin, in a tour de force of rising annoyance, rebuts Weiss’s individualism with a lacerating account of his expatriate sojourn in France, “The years I lived in Paris did one thing for me: they released me from that particular social terror, which was not the paranoia of my own mind, but a real social danger visible in the face of every cop, every boss, everybody.” In other words, while in America, he could not shake any of those daily horrors precisely because of race. He couldn’t as Weiss so blithely stated, see himself as simply an individual. As Baldwin magisterially decimates Weiss’s position, Cavett and Weiss look on in a state of dumbfoundment.
The journeys Baldwin evoked in his letter to his agent revolve here around two poles: his extended stay in France and his return back to America at the height of the civil rights movement. When he moves back to Harlem in the sixties he describes how he felt like a stranger within his own community. In sections called “Paying My Dues,” “Heroes,” “Witness,” “Purity,” “Selling the Negro,” and “I Am Not a Nigger,” he parses not only his observations of American life, but also his own complex and evolving understanding of himself. In an essay called “Black English: A Dishonest Argument,” he reflects, “I was, in some way, in those years, without entirely realizing it, the Great Black Hope of the Great White Father. I was not a racist—or so I thought; Malcolm was a racist, or so they thought. In fact, we were simply trapped in the same situation.”
Instead of following a straight-ahead, curatorial biographical arc in its narrative, Peck’s film is more assertive and present-minded. [...]
Mrs. Bush, forgive me if I think Mrs. Clinton faced a bit more personal humiliation and vitriol from the "compassionate conservative" side of the aisle during President Clinton's term of office than your husband faces today (and with a lot more grace and class than he does, I might add). Her intimate life was combed over with glee by opponents during and after the Lewinsky scandal; she was—and remains to this day—the target of some of the most misogynistic, woman-loathing rhetoric on the American scene.
Many wives in Mrs. Clinton's circumstances would have dumped their philandering spouses and slunk off to a corner of Montana to float the rest of their lives away in a lake of chardonnay. Instead, she ran for political office and won. She's not a member of some mythical Former First Ladies Club in which you, Mrs. Bush, can call in chits, nor did she ever position herself to be.
She's a working opposition senator, and calling your husband's administration on its lies, deceptions and ineptitude is her job as part of those quaint checks and balances.