"I Am Not Your Negro" Is Not Just a Movie!

What is Power?

One of the core themes of the human hero's journey: the polarities of abject powerlessness and the struggle there in, the shallow power of power over others, for lack of ability to source true power balance and love within, and the glorious road onward to discovering the true depth of empowerment, by way of learning who we truly are!

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.” ―
Alice Walker 

Writer and Wise Woman Alice Walker by Jennifer Esperanza #AliceWalker #TheColorPurple #JenniferEsperanza

Alice Walker Photograph,
shared with permission of the Artist: www.Jennifer Esperanza.comAuthor Activist Alice Walker www.alicewalkersgarden.com

After the amazing shared exploration tonight of the film "I Am Not Your Negro," a highly explosive, deep, and simultaneously gentle, initiatory, disturbing, beautiful, transformative eye opener!

The introduction by and Karen Jones Meadows, panel and audience perceptions and responses, all made an indelible impact on me.

Powerhouse Karen Jones Meadows of www.karenjonesmeadows.com
sharing her personal memories and a beautiful written passage of her own.

What I feel, think, and take from the film, the featured artist, and the energies and contributions of all behind the film, our history American, African and Global history, and all of us who were blessed, graced and intensified to take it in, is not a dead, pre-packaged, set reaction, it's one of the most profound gifts of the film. I'd describe it as so uniquely original, real, true and unexpected, that the take away is a living response, like an invitation, that feels equal parts initiatory... and very dearly without end.

James Baldwin really surprised me!

It's a little hard to put into world, yet it was the opposite of the way a modern museum is biased, deadening, and often re-appropriating cultures inappropriately.

The film was and is a deep and impactful Living experience, directly from the heart and Source of one of the more original, arresting and pertinent voices I have ever heard!

It's a film you could watch a hundred times and have a whole new experience each time.
It is a film I can watch once, yet it lives on sparking new ways of seeing, infinitely!  
I look forward to sharing it, watching it, and living with the life of this creation, informing me from within.

Cameroonian and Global Artist and Activist Issa Nyaphaga
www.facebook.com/IssaNyaphaga/
 www.hitip.org/

Thank you James Baldwin and Friends. I can honestly say I feel... appreciate... and am moved to tears and to deeper connections in living this film.

Documentary seems to small a word.

While it is different from the Grand Canyon, seeing this film, feels more on the scale of the Grand Canyon, as opposed to a photo attempting to express the Grand wonders of the real physical expanse.

My best descriptions are two.  It's beyond description!
And it is a remarkable living and most provocative reality.
It's really a living being... a truly surprising living being, that shares a transmission that lives on with anyone who opens to it, and likely more!

That's the best way I can wrap words around tonight.

Author, Visionary, and Trailblazer in the Human Consciousness Movement Wanda Padia

I have more awe filled feelings.

Really wowed and grateful!

It did not read like a documentary on a person, nor a documentary on a people. It was more. It is somehow this living expression that penetrates your soul, and embodies the soul of the artist, and the tribe of African American Humanity expressed in a wholly original way!

Grateful!

Thank you Issa Nyaphaga and Victoria Scott for inviting me... and everyone for cooperatively receiving this with me.

People attending spoke out against power, gave voice to trauma, explained what feels uniquely torturous and traumatizing about aspects of the experience of being black, brown, and or non-white in America.

The film addressed so much my mind is building new compartments to organize and hold it all!

When Karen Jones Meadows shared her true heart and experiences, I felt like I could have spent a whole week listening and relishing the real, what, how, and soul of all she said!

Thank you www.naacpsfnm.blogspot.com/ 
www.iamnotyournegrofilm.com/ 
www.facebook.com/jamesbaldwin/
www.karenjonesmeadows.com/

It was at times uncomfortable to feel and hear the experiences of what people with darker hued African genes, hair and or skin, have often been trained to protect the rest of us, from letting us know what they really think, and what they feel, observe, experience, and wonder about the outwardly non-African Americans.

Then there were the layers below, of what each of us feels and thinks about racism, prejudice, hate, projection, deflection, victimhood, tyranny, the slave class, and more.

I felt hurt that sometimes the hate and racism invades and infiltrates the African American peoples, within their culture, and that the hurt is so deep as to cause reverse racism, which includes more hate. And now I feel more tenderness and awareness to allow space for all of this, in new ways.

Powerful post movie panel featuring Humanity Activist Creatives
Poet Ebony Isis Booth: www.youtube.com/user/IsisSpeaks
Empowering Actress & Community Leader Karen Jones Meadows www.KarenJonesMeadows.com
And Activist, Poet, Writer Darryl Lorenzo Wellington www.communitychange.org/author/dwellington/

Such very tender human experiences expanding! 

I like that there's no real end to it, to the movie's gifts of expanding the witnessing audience's experience, and perceptions.

Human Identification. Such a fascinating, complex, scary, rich, tragic, and triumphant ride!

I step forward, deeply and truly moved by how courageous we are to live out these tests and experiences, and how brilliant and compassionate to find ways to straddle so many distinctive worlds, sometimes alone, and sometimes together.

To be led into something so private, while all together, with so much training against feeling and voicing our true differences, synchronicity, feelings and experiences... blew the walls right off this heart of mine!  Perhaps like layers of an onion, mine and those of us who shared this experience will continue experimenting with such personal walls, and allowing more and more to shed as snakes shed their skin, so we can understand and know each other, each one's experience, ourselves and our worlds even better.  So we can actively participate in transforming co-creating and uplifting it.

Living Cultural Bridge, African Art Purveyor and more: Victoria Scott www.blackartstudio.com/

Amazed, surprised, blessed, graced and awed... fully and truly!
Grateful!

I am reminded that humans are tribal peoples. Tribes enslave and exclude, project and experience, and pass on superstitions... sometimes.

Simultaneously tribes love, protect, steward, celebrate, nourish, care and cooperate.

Let us remember to be the inclusive, curious, celebratory and welcoming tribe!
Let us keep our wonder alive. Let us share this in honoring ways!

Another great milestone. With no official leaders, referees, therapists or specialists, I feel we broke through a lot of old walls tonight. Walls I tend to forget, negate, or deny exist, until I open up, watch, see, share, feel and listen.

America is a lightseed of Grace onto this living Planet, like no other. Tonight we definitely witnessed her bloom!

Crying again, as this living soul of a movie... opens and awakens love, in and through me!

There was far more to the experience, and  experience shared.  Still Some of it lives on within, informing me, and prompting me to renew my outlook, look into people even more deeply, listen better, and value and appreciate people even more now.

So blessed!  May we continue opening to and sharing blessing.  May we continue teaching, expressing, activating, relishing and learning together.

Thank you for sharing this journey with me.