I Am Not Your Negro: James Baldwin and the Spiritual Deadness in White America

Last updated on: May 10, 2017 at 11:14 am by Rebecca Florence Miller

I Am Not Your Negro: James Baldwin and the Spiritual Deadness in White America 2017-05-10T11:14:03-06:00 Rebecca Florence Miller

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So often today, we have seen white liberals expect to be given what our black brothers and sisters refer to as “cookies,” merely for saying a few things that all decent humans should say. White liberals easily become enamored with being on the “right side of history,” to the point that when they are approached by the black community and given feedback on how to be better advocates or when to take a seat, they respond with fragility and offense. White supremacy is everywhere, even among liberal lions.

So where do we turn? Near the end of the film, Baldwin says this: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing that is not faced can be changed.”

America stands at a crossroads today. White America can begin to try to heal the wound that our ancestors and contemporaries have laid upon our black countrymen and women. (As Germany has had to do after the Holocaust, and as South Africa has had to do after apartheid, and as Rwanda has had to do after genocide.) We can repent of sins past and present and face the real situation as it actually is, not as we blissfully imagine it to be. Or we can continue to ignore reality and thereby cause the wound to deepen and become even more raw and infected. What will we choose? As Baldwin said, “We are cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are.”

I’m not greatly optimistic. But even in a seemingly hopeless situation in which people so often choose to stop up their ears, there is still some hope. God changed my heart. He is changing my heart still. If he can change me, he can change others too. Christianity is a religion of conversion stories. It is a grand story of people being turned from darkness to light, from sleep to being awake, from death to life.

And so I pray. And speak. And hope to be used to shake others awake as I have been (and am still being) shaken awake. For the love of my brethren, white and black, and for the glory of God.

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Photo source: IMDB.com.

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