I Am Not Your Negro

There are photographs and archive footage of violence directed at African-Americans through the twentieth century. This includes race-based attacks on African-Americans by people opposed to desegregation, police measures taken at demonstrations during the Civil Rights era, and race riots during the following decades, as well as examples of police brutality such as the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991. There are also depictions of the consequences of such violence, such as images of murder victims lying in morgues or in coffins at funerals, and a photograph of the faces of black men hanged in the course of a racist lynching. The footage and photographs are presented in the context of a documentary that explores the issue of historical and contemporary racial attitudes in the United States. The documentary also includes excerpts from a number of cinema features that contain moments of moderate violence, and a scene from the 1970 film SOLDIER BLUE in which a Native American woman's dress is torn off by cavalry soldiers to reveal full frontal nudity in a brief depiction of sexual threat.

There is infrequent strong language ('f**k') in the lyrics of a song.

There are uses of terms such as 'n****r' in archive footage, which are expressed in directly discriminatory way, but also in an ironic manner by African-American figures as they challenge the language and the attitudes behind it. Other terms, such as 'negro' and 'coloured', are spoken in the historical context of times when such language was used by both black and white communities.