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.
Part 2: “Heroes”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2 Summary: “Heroes”
Baldwin recalls a time in his childhood when a young White school teacher took him under her wing. She had serious discussions with him about art and politics. She was a strong influence on him, and part of the reason why Baldwin says he has never really hated White people, but instead suspected their behavior arose from something other than Whiteness.
Baldwin reflects on the rarity of Black men in cinema and says that the Black actors who were successful “seemed to lie about the world” (19). An exception to this is Clinton Rosemund in They Won’t Forget. Rosemund plays a janitor who works in a building where a White girl is found raped and murdered, and his character is terrified at being accused. Baldwin says this film’s brutality scared him, but also gave him strength.
Baldwin also notes that the massacre of Native Americans has been cinematically glorified, making the White actors look like heroes instead of violent individuals enacting atrocities.
In a letter to Acton, his literary agent, Baldwin speaks about going on the road and seeing Coretta Scott King, King’s children, and Malcolm X’s widow.
Part 2 Analysis
In this section, Baldwin reflects on the role of heroes and how these figures can both fight and uphold racism. Baldwin’s story about his young White teacher underscores his conviction that White people are not inherently evil. Instead, they uphold racism for another reason, which Baldwin implies is inertia and a lack of the moral courage that confronting and dismantling the racism inherent to America’s social, political, and legal arenas would require. Baldwin’s belief that White people are “not the devil” is an increasing point of tension between some other Black activists, in particular Malcolm X.
This section is also the first to use video clips from the films that Baldwin references in his notes. Baldwin talks critically about supposed “representation” in cinema, arguing that having a Black actor on screen is not enough. In fact, Black actors can actually also uphold racism by misrepresenting society as less racist than it is and pacifying viewers. The same effect occurs in Westerns, which make the cowboys look like “heroes” and erases the fact that White settlers committed genocide against Native American people. In this way, the construction of “heroes” can also solidify an inaccurate view of history, that works to support racism. This point is reminiscent of Peck’s reflection in the introduction on the historical erasure of the successful Haitian Revolution.
Baldwin says that the only Black character in a movie who really struck him as a child was the janitor in They Won’t Forget because in his despair, he struck at truth. To Baldwin, an ugly truth is preferable to a happy lie, but he notes that many viewers would prefer to see things as they want them to be.
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By James Baldwin
