Raoul Peck's We Are Not Your Negro (2016)

The most dangerous thing in America is a nigger with a library card.
The Wire, season 2, episode 10 (written by Ed Burns).

Raoul Peck's passionate and intelligent film is about James Baldwin and race relations in America, where the election of an African-American president did not solve everything the way Robert Kennedy (quoted  in the film) thought it would.  Baldwin himself found Kennedy's statement particularly condescending, "We've been here for 400 years and now they say that if we are good we can be president!"  Baldwin was not always taken particularly seriously during his life (he died in 1987) because he was not only African-American he was also homosexual and an intellectual who lived a good part of his of his life in France.  When he returned to America to fight for civil rights he found himself shunned by the NAACP for his homosexuality but he continued to write, give speeches and make public appearances.  His last, unfinished, book about Medgar Evers, Malcom X and Martin Luther King, Jr. is used for the narration of Peck's film, read effectively by Samuel L. Jackson, who lets the words speak eloquently for themselves.

Baldwin spent his early years in the Harlem public library, reading nearly every book that was there, until he was given a special dispensation to use other branches of the library.  Much of Peck's film consists of his speeches and appearances on TV.  At one point when he was on the Dick Cavett show another guest, philosopher Paul Weiss, came on and asked Baldwin why he was so focused on race, since a black and a white philosopher would have more in common than a black philosopher and a white factory worker.  Baldwin, mildly amused, said he understood that, but the problem was that most white people would not; the "Negro problem" is more of a white problem.  Baldwin's analyses are often intelligent, with a sure knowledge of history and popular culture, though I don't agree that all Western films are as simple as he sees them (though many are).  Peck shows images from John Ford's The Searchers, in which the Indians have great dignity.  Nor does Peck mention Ford's Sergeant Rutledge, in which a black cavalry unit is portrayed quite positively. In any case, when was the last time there was a serious discussion of race on late-night TV? And where is a James Baldwin when we need him, in these polarized times?