Blackout for Human Rights’ third annual #BlackoutBlackFriday launches with a series of cultural happenings in New York, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area. This includes a nationwide call to action encouraging individuals to refrain from shopping on what is one of the most important shopping days of the year and instead engage in cultural activism in order to protest social and economic injustice in the U.S.
Schedule:
4:30pm – Doors open
5:00pm – Film program begins with a screening of short films, followed by the documentary I Am Not Your Negro by acclaimed Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck. Peck has taken the 30 completed pages of James Baldwin’s final, unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, in which the author went about the painful task of remembering his three fallen friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, and crafted an elegantly precise and bracing film essay. Peck’s film, about the unholy agglomeration of myths, institutionalized practices both legal and illegal, and displaced white terror that have long perpetuated the tragic state of race in America, is anchored by the presence of Baldwin himself in images and words, read beautifully by Samuel L. Jackson in hushed, burning tones. A Magnolia Pictures release. I Am Not Your Negro opens theatrically at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on February 3, 2017.
7:00pm – Panel discussion following the screening, including a special guest as moderator and Deborah Willis, African-American artist, photographer, and curator; Khary O. Polk, Assistant Professor of Black Studies and Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College; and NYC-based Alexandria Smith, leader in the Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter collective.