“The only thing wrong with Black people, is that we think something is wrong with Black people.”
Oscar-winning director Roger Ross Williams brings Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s best-selling book Stamped From the Beginning to life, using vivid animations and leading female scholars to explore the history of anti-Black racist ideas.
Some Americans insist that we’re living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America—it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit.
Stamped From the Beginning explores how anti-Black racist ideas were created and spread by Europeans who purposefully utilized prejudice to achieve material gain. Deeply rooted in American society, the spread of these racist stories suggest that racism against Black people was deliberately created to justify our enslavement and exploitation.
The book and documentary’s title, Stamped From the Beginning, comes from an 1860 speech given to congress by Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederate States of America. In the speech, Davis calls Black people inferior and “stamped from the beginning,” or subordinate since their creation.
In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history.
He focuses the lives of five Americans to tell this history. Puritan minister Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary activist Angela Davis.
As Kendi shows, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. They were created to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched racist policies and the nation’s racial inequities.
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