Based on a social contract, the purpose of a society is to uphold the standards of the people they are being upheld by. Trevor Noah speaks about this in one of the episodes on his The Daily Social Distancing Show series. When Noah first talks about society, he brings up the times where people would say “this is not how our society should be run” and “this is not how our society is built.” To these statements, he cleverly questions what society actually is and dives into how society is a contract. Within this contract, people hold each other accountable for following the rules set by the norms put in place by the elites at the top. To be a full citizen in this society, one must abide by the rules and continue to facilitate a community where these rules are followed. However, what happens when the ones enforcing the rules don’t follow their rules to begin with? By discussing this paradox, Noah begins to go into how these citizens are expected to follow societal rules if the elites don’t even follow their own rules. Under this idea, when society’s elitists don’t abide by the rules, the foundations of the society crumble and the social contract breaks. 

Through his book highlighted by the movie “I Am Not Your Negro”, James Baldwin continued to give a voice to three men who were silenced way too early in their lives: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Medgar Evers. These three men dedicated their lives to fighting against African American injustices and played a huge role in America’s fight against inequality. Although Malcolm X did not like the way that Martin Luther King Jr. encouraged silent and peaceful protests, they all collectively fought towards the same cause. However, none of these men saw past the age of 40, and much of the fight for equality was nowhere near done. Baldwin, too, ironically was unable to finish the book that this movie was based on. These unfinished narratives of the men and Baldwin’s actual unfinished book all allude to the same theme of persistence. Even though these figures were no longer able to spearhead the revolution, they still lived on in the spirit of their people constantly fighting for change in a backward society.

Overall, I was very disturbed while watching the movie and it did not sit well with me. All it did was remind me of how recent these events are even though this backward society is painted to look like inequality was fixed a century ago. Textbooks have somewhat distorted the timeline of the civil rights movement to make it seem distant when in reality, these events are actually very recent. Especially during the pictures of the hanging women and men towards the end of the movie, the pictures seemed like they were older than they actually were. The movie reinforced this idea when it showed the parallels of these earlier public lynchings to present-day abuse. They highlighted the continued abuse being done against the Black communities through the clips of police abuse at protests and a small portion of Rodney King’s abuse. Although it may seem as if we have progressed from this hatred-ruled society, our modern-day society is still as backward as it can ever be.