34 pages • 1 hour read
James BaldwinI Am Not Your Negro
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Index of Terms
The American Western
Baldwin repeatedly invokes the western genre, and Peck uses clips from the films that Baldwin references to underline his points. For Baldwin, westerns illustrate how history is misrepresented to support White supremacy. The traditional western makes White settlers into heroes and Native Americans into violent enemies, erasing the reality that White people committed genocide against Native Americans. This ashistorical representation provides a narrative justification for both settler colonialism and White supremacy.
Baldwin also uses the figure of Native Americans to illustrate the awakening of young Black Americans to the reality of racism. He points out that because American cinema is so dominated by White faces (John Wayne is a primary example) that both Black and White Americans grow up seeing White actors as heroes. It is a shocking and uncomfortable experience for young Black viewers to realize that their social position in America is more similar to that of the Native Americans than the White heroes. They, like Native Americans, are subjugated for the benefit of White supremacy.
Black Actors, Dancers, and Musicians
Extending his examination of American pop culture, Baldwin explores how Black professional entertainers are viewed and treated in America. Baldwin uses Sidney Poitier, Ray Charles, and Harry Belafonte as his primary examples. While examining these figures, Baldwin makes two main claims: Black entertainers often are either used, or use themselves, to spread a false impression of American life and the effect of racism; and pop culture (especially but not exclusively cinema) works to make Black men appear harmless and sexless, while simultaneously benefitting from the sexual appeal of figures like Poitier.
Baldwin describes the injustice of having Black artists used as a means to contradict the reality that structural and individual racism makes America seriously dangerous and that this racism is deeply-rooted and cannot be resolved by symbolic gestures of interracial unity. For instance, when Shirley Temple and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson danced together in 1935 film The Little Colonel, Robinson’s technical skill was obvious, but the film also made Robinson’s character appear happy in his subservience (he was a butler for a White family). This erases the experience of living with racism that followed Robinson throughout his life. In other words, Robinson was a skilled artist who entertained by Black and White audiences, but he was also used in films as a means of glossing over the reality of racist violence.
For Baldwin, the Black actor or musician is the representation of how Black people are both exploited and subjugated in America. These artists are used as props by White profiteers, to relate messages that often only further solidify racist ideas.
School
Images of classrooms, schoolyards, and students frequently recur in I Am Not Your Negro. Education was important to Baldwin, whose early self-conception and sense of self-worth had to do with his realization that he was intelligent and capable of grappling with abstract concepts. The image of school in the text, however, is a complex one. Though it is a place of great potential, school is also shown as a simulacrum of racist society. This is most obviously true when Baldwin talks about segregation and the tumultuous desegregation of schools. This is exactly what drove Baldwin to return to America, after having lived for years in France—he felt that he must stand with other Black Americans while students like Dorothy Counts attempted to integrate into all-White schools and were subjected to violent harassment from White classmates and neighbors. In this case, school is a dangerous, hostile place, where White adults and children alike fool themselves into thinking that their base violence is protecting White purity.
School is also where students are inculcated with inaccurate and racist ideas of American history. Baldwin returns repeatedly to the example of history books that make settler colonialism appear heroic, without acknowledging that White settlers brutalized and massacred Native Americans. This false representation of American history makes White violence seem justified and courageous. By authoritatively presenting a prejudiced and inaccurate version of history and education, classrooms can train the next generation to uphold the current, racist social order.
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