"The Bigger Picture?"

    James Baldwin's "I Am Not Your Nigger" documentary gives his perspective/story on the Negro in America.  Throughout the video, we, the audience should be able to concur that,"The story of the Negro in America is the story of America" and it is NOT a pretty story at all! 

    From the movie and television clips of the past that are intertwined with the commercial ads, broadway shows, freedom marches, police beatings, lynchings and other maltreatments of the African- American, Mr. Baldwin enlightens us on how this so called "Great Country" has never known what to do with the black population.  White society's actions have shown us this. We saw it in the past, the present and unless, whites face this reality, we will still see it in the future.  Baldwin provided the one solution to this anti-black acceptance with just a simple question: "White people have to find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place?" (Mic drop)

    The documentary clearly shows how mainstream White America only cares about their own safety and profits NOT the brown and black people they stole from their own country and brought to America to be slaves for over 400 years and counting.  So, who really is the criminal or monster because it is crystal clear that the Negro is NOT the problem! 

    Look at the killing of fourteen year old Emmett Til by a mob of white men who was tortured, eye gouged out, tied with barb wire to a 70 pound cotton gin fan, shot in the head and dumped in the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi in 1955. Look at the angry mobs of white people who taunted and humiliated fifteen year old Dorothy Counts for wanting to uphold the law and integrate schools in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1957. Look at the beating of an unarmed black man, Rodney King at the hands of four Los Angeles Police in 1992.  Look at the murder of George Floyd in prime time/daylight at the hands of a Minneapolis Police Officer who knelt on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. The list could go on and on and on and on... yet the black person who stands up to fight for what is right (equality) is considered inhumane and a criminal for attacking the power structure of the Western World. The main message here is It's Bigger Than Black or White! There's a problem with the whole way of life. It can't change overnight.~Author, rapper Lil Baby.

    In many previous readings, the message has been reiterated over and over: black and brown people in America are dispensable.  In the reading of Disability Critical Race Studies: Theorizing at the Intersections of Race and Disability,an author, Matsuda 1987 states, "Those who have experienced discrimination speak with a special voice to which we should listen."   Hence why Black leaders like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Huey Newton, Bobby Seales, Angela Davis, Marcus Garvey and James Baldwin unequivocally can speak out on Race Relations in America for historically, people of color have been positioned as disabled and inferior in order to justify limited rights and oppression. 

     The realization that Blacks have built this country's economy is still not enough. Now, that we do not pick their cotton or build the railroads, we are no longer needed. Therefore, there may be no hope for the so called American Dream for people of color.  "People who are denied participation by their very presence will wreck it! History is not the past, it is the present-we are OUR history! ~James Baldwin