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 idea.
Netflix announced its partnership with renowned and sometimes controversial professor Dr. Ibram X. Kendi in January 2021 to produce two documentaries and an animated series based on his bestselling books. One of the documentaries, Stamped from the Beginning, will be released on Netflix in 2023.
Stamped From The Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
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.
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 uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to drive 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.
In shedding light on this history, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose racist thinking. In the process, he gives us reason to hope.
Buy tickets at Eventbrite.com
