An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

me think in terms of American’s inability to reform and include Black
Americans on an equal basis, Baldwin helped me imagine that maybe, just
maybe, if we all critique and struggle for the soul of the US, if white people
really understood how oppressed people feel, things can change. Although
I’m pessimistic about the reformation of American democracy, Baldwin
remains a reminder of possibility—that freedom is just around the corner.
In 2017, Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro was released,
and I was excited to see it and think with it. After watching it twice, I
eventually wrote a reflection called “Indigenous Genocide and Black
Liberation,” which was originally published on the Indian Country Today
website and was received well by many Native people. I share parts of it
here as a way to offer a critical reflection of Baldwin and his understanding
of Black belonging.
In February 2017, during a warm Sunday afternoon in North Carolina, I
went to watch I Am Not Your Negro. I felt all of the emotions. Anger.
Sadness. Joy. Deep reflection. I appreciated the genius of Baldwin
combined with the narrative and visual storytelling of Peck. I felt the
despair of racism and idealism of liberation. I suppose I experienced all of
the emotions that James Baldwin would want someone to feel when they
engage with his work.
The documentary is a discussion of race in the United States. It is, like
much of Baldwin’s work, a mirror for white America to see its problems. In
his writing, he encouraged Black people not to accept the visuals of
blackness that white people propagated. As he wrote in The Fire Next Time,
“There is no need for you to try and become like white people” for “they
are, in effect, trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until
they understand it, they cannot be released from it.” 58
The documentary is based on thirty pages of a book Baldwin was going
to write on the meaning of the deaths of his three personal friends: Medgar
Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. The film blends historical
interviews featuring Baldwin and other notable figures, as well as recent
video of the rebellion in Ferguson. The images make it powerful and
disturbing, reminding one of the long history and all-encompassing nature
of antiblackness in this country. We must recognize antiblackness (and anti-
Indianness, too!) as a core part of this country’s material and psychological
development, and Baldwin reminds us of that. As English literature and
Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe argues in In the Wake: On Blackness