Summary:

This paper deals with Raoul Peck’s documentary based on personal
history and an unfinished text by James Baldwin about the installed
paradigm of racial segregation, violence and identity. This problem is
thought with contributions from the psychology of liberation and
critical philosophy, to think of a practical ethic that constantly
addresses and in different areas the standardized mechanisms of
ideological reaffirmation that consolidate segregation and produce
social and individual symptoms. This paper also argues that Baldwin’s
overcoming proposal carries the same symptoms of social trauma.
Therefore, the construction of subjectivity as an inscription of the
subject in history also requires that same critical review of oneself
and the recognition of the very traces of social conflict.

Key words: identity | segregation | subjectivity | responsibility