An emotional poverty so bottomless

I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life. This failure of the private life has always had the most devastating effect on American public conduct, and on black-white relations.

If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they never would have become so dependent on what they call "the Negro problem". This problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them. And this, not from anything blacks may or may not be doing but because of the role of a guilty and constricted white imagination as assigned to the blacks.

If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have needed to invent and could never have become so dependent on what they still call ‘the Negro problem.’ This problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them; and this not from anything blacks may or may not be doing but because of the role a guilty and constricted white imagination has assigned to the blacks… People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead. The crucial thing, here, is that the sum of these individual abdications menaces life all over the world.

Propos de James Baldwin entendus dans

I am not your negro, Raoul Peck (2017)

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Bonus citation :

"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power,

is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."

All men are brothers - That's the bottom line

Le docu - ce terme est réducteur, s'agissant ici d'un véritable objet cinématographique - à voir du moment, c'est "I am not your negro" ("Je ne suis pas votre nègre", en VF). Le réalisateur Raoul Peck nous donne à voir et comprendre la longue lutte pour les droits civiques des noirs américains, sur la base des écrits et d'un projet littéraire inachevé du brillant écrivain James Baldwin (1924-1987).

L'Histoire est connue (tout du moins dans ses grandes lignes), mais c'est sa réalité tangible dont le spectateur prend ici conscience. Sans concession, mais en toute intelligence. (Ai-je déjà écrit que ce James Baldwin était brillant?)

Plus largement, est-ici posée la problématique d'une Nation qui n'accepte pas tous ses enfants...

I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I'm forced to be an optimist. I'm forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive. But the future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people and our representatives -- it is entirely up to the American people whether or not they are going to face, and deal with, and embrace this stranger whom they maligned so long.

What white people have to do, is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I'm not a nigger, I'm a man, but if you think I'm a nigger, it means you need it and you got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that.

Raoul Peck, I am not your negro (2017)

au cinéma à partir du 20 mai, sur arte+7 pendant 4 jours encore