I Am Not Your Negro

Baldwin says his ancestors didn’t want to come to America, but neither did the ancestors of White Americans. He says Americans are afflicted by an inability to connect their personal lives with their public stances, which negatively impacts how White people behave. White people, he says, require a constructing Black people as a problem in order to bolster their own position of superiority and supposed purity—but the invention of this problem has made White people monstrous.

In a clip from the film No Way Out, a White character hits a Black character and screams that more love has been extended to Black kids than to him. 

Baldwin reflects on Black men’s place in cinema. Baldwin says that screen actors Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte are sex symbols, but they’d never be cast in the same roles as White sex symbols. Black people, according to Baldwin, disliked the 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, as it used Poitier “against them” and robbed the Black community of one of their artists. He says the final fade-out in American films signifies “reconciliation” and cites the 1967 film In The Heat of the Night as an example.

In his youth, Baldwin was friends with a White girl in New York, but their friendship was destroyed by the knowledge that she was safer walking alone than with him.