I’d like to thank Diana Gordon of the Orpheum Performing Arts Center, for extending a most generous partnership to us at The Kansas African American Museum for the recent screening of “I’m Not Your Negro.” We’re grateful for this new friendship and for our other partners from the Tallgrass Film Festival, but even more for the film’s powerful message. James Baldwin, the documentary’s focus, feels as relevant as ever in this era of bitter American societal divisions. “We are cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are,” Baldwin said in the film. “And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame and so ugly.” As we approach the 50th anniversary of summer rioting that itself prompted a report on our yet unresolved problem of implicit and explicit color consciousness, his axiom, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” offers a blunt reminder of what we need to do. That report, the Kerner Commission Report, and others before and since, have been ignored. We continue to do so at our own peril.

Baldwin wrote: “God sent Noah the rainbow sign; no more water, fire next time.”