“I Am Not Your Negro” quotes
(2016)
Title I Am Not Your Negro
Year 2016
Director Raoul Peck
Genre History, Documentary
Year 2016
Director Raoul Peck
Genre History, Documentary
Plot – I Am Not Your Negro is a 2016 documentary film, based on James Baldwin's unfinished manuscript Remember This House. The film explores the history of racism in the United States through Baldwin's collection of notes and letters about the lives of his close friends and civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.
All actors – Samuel L. Jackson, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Robert F. Kennedy, Harry Belafonte, Paul Weiss, Dick Cavett, H. Rap Brown, Bob Dylan, Leander Perez, Sidney Poitier, Ray Charles, Doris Day
show all“I Am Not Your Negro” Quotes 12 quotes
“The story of the Negro in America is the story of America, and it is not a pretty story.”
“It comes as a great shock, around the age of five or six or seven, to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you. It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity has not in its whole system of...” (continue)(continue reading)
“But the Negro in this country... the future of the Negro in this country... is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people and not representatives. It is entirely up to the American people whether or not they are going to face and deal with and embrace the stranger they have maligned so...” (continue)(continue reading)
“It is not a racial problem. It's 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...” (continue)(continue reading)
“Someone once said to me that the people in general cannot bear very much reality. He meant by this that they prefer fantasy to a truthful recreation of their experience. People have quite enough reality to bear, by simply getting through their lives, raising their children, dealing with the eternal conundrums of birth, taxes, and death.”
“We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.”
“For a very long time, America prospered. This prosperity cost millions of people their lives. Now, not even the people who are the most spectacular recipients of the benefits of this prosperity are able to endure these benefits. They can neither understand them nor do without them. Above all, they cannot imagine the price paid by their victims,...” (continue)(continue reading)
“What white people have to do, is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I'm not a nigger, I'm a man, but if you think I'm a nigger, it means you need it.”
“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 has been faced. History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals.”
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