Imagining Justice 2019: IJ Readings

Includes video lectures and discussion guides that complement the themes of his book.

This was a popular video series among my students last year.

Available through Films on Demand

An Oscar-nominated documentary narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO explores the continued peril America faces from institutionalized racism and is based on James Baldwin's unfinished manuscript.

James Baldwin speaking about race, imperialism, and identity in 1969.

This film biography of Baldwin’s life captures the passion of his beliefs with stirring excerpts from his novels and striking archival footage dating from the Harlem Renaissance through to the author’s commentary on civil rights to his writing retreats in Istanbul and Europe. Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and William Styron provide insight as the program skillfully links excerpts from Baldwin’s major works to different historical stages in black-white dialogue.

BIRTHRIGHT: A WAR STORY tells the stories of women caught up in a frightening new legal system which criminalizes and women reproductive rights, threatens lives, and challenges constitutional protections.

Plastic China reveals the unsafe conditions in which adults and children alike toil, as they seek to eke out a basic living by processing toxic plastic waste products that they know are polluting their rivers and lakes, contaminating the air that they breathe, and compromising their health in noticeably painful ways. The film exposes not only a disparity between Western lifestyles of consumption and those who deal with the concomitant waste, but also in the hierarchical structure of facility owners and the workers they employ for low compensation in unhealthy and sometimes abusive environments.

Climate Refugees is the first feature film to explore in-depth the global human impact of climate change and its serious destabilizing effect on international politics. The film turns the distant concept of global warming into a concrete human problem with enormous worldwide consequences. Experts predict that by mid-century hundreds of millions of people will be uprooted as a result of sea level rise and an increase in extreme weather events, droughts and desertification. Little is being done to plan for the potential mass migration of millions of refugees who will be forced to cross national borders.

Father Gregory Boyle has chosen to "become the message," by devoting his life to rescuing lives ravaged by gang violence. Segment from the documentary Heaven: How Five Religions See It by Crew Neck Production (2011).