by Tim Gordon
There’s something about James Baldwin’s voice that never lets you off the hook. It doesn’t soothe. It doesn’t bend to make you comfortable. Instead, it cuts clear, incisive, and devastatingly honest. That’s the power Raoul Peck harnessed when he brought Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript Remember This House to the screen as I Am Not Your Negro.
If you haven’t seen this film, understand this: it’s not your standard civil rights documentary. It’s not just an elegy for Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, or Martin Luther King Jr. It’s a reckoning, through Baldwin’s eyes, with a country that never stops telling on itself.
Baldwin was never a leader like Martin or Malcolm. He didn’t stand at a podium calling people to march, nor did he build grassroots movements in Mississippi like Medgar. Baldwin was a witness, the one who stood close enough to understand the fire burning in each of these men, yet distant enough to see the bigger picture they all fit into. He called himself “a witness” for a reason: he held up a mirror to America, not out of hatred, but out of a deep, bruised love for what this country claimed it could be.
I Am Not Your Negro is powerful because Peck refuses to pin Baldwin’s words on the past. He uses Baldwin’s searing insights to show us exactly how little has changed. Peck cuts together images of Civil Rights-era protests with scenes from Ferguson, with cell phone footage, with the same old story: Black bodies policed, punished, and discarded. In Peck’s hands, Baldwin’s words are like a blade that never dulls.
So much of this power comes from Peck himself, a Haitian filmmaker and political activist whose own life has been shaped by the fallout of colonialism, dictatorship, and the fight for liberation. Peck has always been a director drawn to the intersection of politics and identity, from Lumumba to Sometimes in April. With I Am Not Your Negro, he doesn’t just adapt Baldwin’s manuscript; he channels it through his own lived experience as someone who understands what it means to navigate fractured histories, stolen narratives, and the endless struggle for self-definition. That’s why this film isn’t just another entry in Peck’s filmography; it’s a defining part of his cinematic legacy, stitched together with Baldwin’s timeless words.
And what makes Baldwin’s legacy so vital is that he doesn’t allow us the luxury of distance. His witness is not locked away in the 1960s. He is speaking to us now, and to the generations still to come. Baldwin’s sharp, poetic truth-telling is a blueprint for how to see this country for what it is, and still dare to demand that it be better. He left behind a roadmap for understanding how power, race, fear, and hope collide, and why silence, in the face of that, is complicity.
That’s why I often revisit this story, to keep myself cinematically grounded. This film reminds me that these men’s lives weren’t just chapters in history books; they were examples. Many of us were inspired and aspired to impact the world the way they did. This story is a validation of how we, as a people, feel, the struggle and the journey our forefathers endured before they handed the baton to us. It’s a reminder that we must keep passing it forward.
I Am Not Your Negro won’t let you look away, and that’s the point. Peck’s work ensures Baldwin’s legacy lives on as an unflinching mirror for future generations. It’s a film that challenges us not to be passive spectators but to become witnesses in our own time. The only question Baldwin leaves us with is the same one that will always echo through his work: What will you do with this truth now that you see it?