So after months of waiting, I finally watched the Raoul Peck documentary I Am Not Your Negro, even if I had to drive to Grand Rapids to do it. (It's opening in Harbor Springs on March 3rd, I found out yesterday. Oh well.) It was as disturbing and depressing and compelling and engaging as I hoped it would be, and in a year of fantastic documentaries on race and culture (including but not limited to the ESPN event O.J.: Made In America and 13th on Netflix) that are in Oscar contention, I Am Not Your Negro still managed to rise above them all by narrowing the perspective to one man -- James Baldwin -- thematically examining three black male leaders murdered in the '60s -- Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. -- united by agitation and assassination and the color of their skin.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
Heaven knows there are more biting and trenchant quotes than the above nugget from Baldwin's scholarship, but it specifically speaks to the heart of his exploration of the relation of African-Americans to America. More specifically, it addresses the active rejection of any elaborative examination of what slavery and its cultural and institutional legacy has done to 1/8th of the U.S. population. Furthermore, I would narrow that down even further, to the African-American male, and the hurdles that such males faced then and would face even today.
According to official estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, the African-American male population in the United States was 21.5 million in 2013, just under 1/16th of all Americans. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three African-American men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime, or just over 2 of every 100 Americans. In other words, African-American men are a small percentage of the overall population, but a disproportionate percentage of the prison population. And if "African-American male as potential prisoner" is an archetype that any American can call up at will, what does that do to the identity of African-American males? In addition, consider the following with respect to cultural representation:
Conversely, the African-American population of the NFL is 68%, while the NBA in 2015 was composed of 74.4% African-American players, Therefore, if the average American never encounters an African-American male in person, he or she will encounter a large percentage of African-Americans if they consume the two biggest sports in America. And if he or she does encounter an African-American male in the flesh, the context -- blue collar, service occupations, prison -- isn't positively valenced. You don't have to have any knowledge in psychology to grasp the concept of self-fulfilling prophecies, and the negative feedback loop for African-American male identity is a pernicious and almost unavoidable circle. I won't even get into African-American representation in popular music and pornography, but I'm sure you can generate your own examples in either of those domains.
At the end of I Am Not Your Negro, Baldwin -- sighing with the weight of multiple oppressed identities collapsed into one singular person -- considers himself an optimist at heart, albeit one that's constantly assailed with evidence towards the darker heart. Here's another quote from Baldwin:
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
To that quote and to my above points, I would only swap "pain" with "fear," the fear elicited from white males and white power structures by the singular stimuli of African-American males, stubbornly stereotyped as nearly omnipotent in sex and crime and athletics, creating threats to identities both real and imagined, both African-American and Caucasian. And I don't ever see that fear going away, or the constraints against African-American males. The products and policies of pain and fear are malleable and malingering, and I am ashamed to be any part of that systematic shaving away of basic humanity. Or, as Baldwin once said:
The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
Heaven knows there are more biting and trenchant quotes than the above nugget from Baldwin's scholarship, but it specifically speaks to the heart of his exploration of the relation of African-Americans to America. More specifically, it addresses the active rejection of any elaborative examination of what slavery and its cultural and institutional legacy has done to 1/8th of the U.S. population. Furthermore, I would narrow that down even further, to the African-American male, and the hurdles that such males faced then and would face even today.
According to official estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, the African-American male population in the United States was 21.5 million in 2013, just under 1/16th of all Americans. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three African-American men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime, or just over 2 of every 100 Americans. In other words, African-American men are a small percentage of the overall population, but a disproportionate percentage of the prison population. And if "African-American male as potential prisoner" is an archetype that any American can call up at will, what does that do to the identity of African-American males? In addition, consider the following with respect to cultural representation:
Conversely, the African-American population of the NFL is 68%, while the NBA in 2015 was composed of 74.4% African-American players, Therefore, if the average American never encounters an African-American male in person, he or she will encounter a large percentage of African-Americans if they consume the two biggest sports in America. And if he or she does encounter an African-American male in the flesh, the context -- blue collar, service occupations, prison -- isn't positively valenced. You don't have to have any knowledge in psychology to grasp the concept of self-fulfilling prophecies, and the negative feedback loop for African-American male identity is a pernicious and almost unavoidable circle. I won't even get into African-American representation in popular music and pornography, but I'm sure you can generate your own examples in either of those domains.
At the end of I Am Not Your Negro, Baldwin -- sighing with the weight of multiple oppressed identities collapsed into one singular person -- considers himself an optimist at heart, albeit one that's constantly assailed with evidence towards the darker heart. Here's another quote from Baldwin:
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
To that quote and to my above points, I would only swap "pain" with "fear," the fear elicited from white males and white power structures by the singular stimuli of African-American males, stubbornly stereotyped as nearly omnipotent in sex and crime and athletics, creating threats to identities both real and imagined, both African-American and Caucasian. And I don't ever see that fear going away, or the constraints against African-American males. The products and policies of pain and fear are malleable and malingering, and I am ashamed to be any part of that systematic shaving away of basic humanity. Or, as Baldwin once said:
The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
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