I Am Not Your Negro Page #8

to the wall

When I was laying in jail

With my back turned

to the wall

I just laid down

and dreamed I could...

The American way of life

has failed

to make people happier,

or make them better.

We do not want to admit this,

and we do not admit it.

We persist in believing

that the empty and criminal

among our children

are the result of some

miscalculation in the formula

that can be corrected.

That the bottomless

and aimless hostility

which makes our cities among

the most dangerous in the world

is created and felt

by a handful of aberrants,

that the lack, yawning

everywhere in this country,

of passionate conviction,

of personal authority,

proves only our rather appealing

tendency to be gregarious

and democratic.

To look around

the United States today,

is enough to make

prophets and angels weep.

This is not the land

of the free.

It is only very unwillingly

and sporadically...

...the home of the brave.

I sometimes feel it

to be an absolute miracle

that the entire black population

of the United States of America

has not long ago

succumbed to raging paranoia.

People finally say to you,

in an attempt to dismiss

the social reality,

"But you're so bitter!"

Well, I may

or may not be bitter,

but if I were, I would have

good reasons for it.

Chief among them that American

blindness, or cowardice,

which allow us to pretend

that life presents no reasons

for being bitter.

In this country,

for a dangerously long time,

there have been

two levels of experience.

One, to put it cruelly,

can be summed up in the images

of Gary Cooper and Doris Day,

two of the most grotesque

appeals to innocence

the world has ever seen.

And the other,

subterranean, indispensable,

and denied,

can be summed up, let us say,

in the tone and in the face

of Ray Charles.

Hey mama,

Don't you treat me wrong

Come and love your daddy

All night long

I know it's all right now

Hey, hey

When you see me in misery

Come on baby, see about me

There has never been

any genuine confrontation

between these two levels

of experience.

Should I be bad

Or nice?

Should I surrender?

His pleading words

so tenderly

Entreat me

Is this the night that love

Finally defeats me?

You cannot lynch me

and keep me in ghettos

without becoming

something monstrous yourselves.

And furthermore, you give me

a terrifying advantage.

You never had to look at me.

I had to look at you.

I know more about you

than you know about me.

Not everything that is faced

can be changed,

but nothing can be changed

until it is faced.

History is not the past.

It is the present.

We carry our history with us.

We are our history.

If we pretend otherwise,

we literally are criminals.

I attest to this.

The world is not white.

It never was white,

cannot be white.

White is a metaphor for power,

and that is simply a way of

describing Chase Manhattan Bank.

I can't be a pessimist,

because I'm alive.

To be a pessimist means

you have agreed that human life

is an academic matter,

so I'm forced to be an optimist.

I am forced to believe

that we can survive

whatever we must survive.

But...

...the Negro in this country...

...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 not representatives.

It is entirely up to

the American people

whether or not they are going

to face and deal with

and embrace the stranger

they have maligned so long.

What white people have to do

is try to find out,

in their own hearts,

why it was necessary

to have a "n*gger"

in the first place,

because I'm not a n*gger,

I'm a man.

But if you think I'm a n*gger,

it means you need him.

The question you've got to

ask yourself,

the white population of this

country has got to ask itself,

North and South,

because it's one country,

and for the Negro,

there is no difference between

the North and the South...

it's just a difference

in the way they castrate you,

but the fact of the castration

is the American fact.

If I'm not the n*gger here

and you invented him,

you the white people

invented him,

then you've got to find out why.

And the future of the country

depends on that,

whether or not it's able

to ask that question.

Rate this script:3.2 / 9 votes