Reflection On The Film I Am Not Your Negro By Raoul Reck

Racial Conflict and the American Dream
Student’s Name
Institution
Racial Conflict and the American Dream
Today, Americans of all races and origins enjoy equal rights and freedom. But this was not always the case. The Blacks have struggled to live the American dream since the Declaration of Independence in 1776. This paper is a reflection on the struggle for the blacks with reference to the film I Am Not Your Negro by Raoul Peck and the article Know your history: Understanding racism in the US by A’Lella Bundles.
I Am Not Your Negro brings into focus the struggle Black people went through in their struggle for equal rights in the 1960s and 1970s. Away from the limelight, it was also a personal struggle as shown by the experiences of Baldwin. His vision and the rights he was fighting for came at a high price, people around him were dying. As King always said often, “suffering is redemptive” and it is also inevitably personal. The film shows how Baldwin struggled to come to terms with the deaths of Evers in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965 and King in 1968. In I Am Not Your Negro, Baldwin was always far away when he received the news. When the radio announcer breaks in and the phone rings with a devastating message, he collapses and goes numb. He wrote of King’s funeral, “I was concentrating on holding myself together. I did not want to weep for Martin … I may have been afraid that if I began to weep, I would not be able to stop” (Baldwin, 2017).
The racial conflict made the American dream unattainable for Blacks for many years in the past. Since the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the quest for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” has been an American aspiration (A’Lella, 2015). Blacks have faced so many setbacks as they strive to live the American dream. At one point they were not even considered American citizens. In 1857, the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision made it clear that people of African descent (free or enslaved) had no legal standing in the courts and w...