July 10, 2017

I Am Not Your Negro


[Disclaimer: The author of this post is aware that two documentaries released in the same year, both up for Academy Awards, that depict different but correlated aspects of the black experience in America over the last several decades, need not be compared directly to or ranked against one another,]

Ava DuVernay's 13th was probably slightly better for me, in that it was a little more eye-opening and straightforward, and still horribly depressing and tragic. But I'm also a guy who appreciates numbers and figures and charts and trends. This movie, which was Samuel L. Jackson reading prose on race relations written thirty years ago by James Baldwin, superimposed over footage and images of all sorts of shitty things from the last, uh, hundred years or so - basically for as long as we've been able to film and record anything at all - I mean, I can see why this movie resonated so well and so powerfully with so many people. See them both, I guess, really, if you haven't.

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