“Time and again, racist ideas have not been cooked up from the boiling pot of ignorance and hate. Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era and redirect the blame onto Black people.”
In his book Stamped from the Beginning, the Black academic and activist Ibram X. Kendi chronicles the story of racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. Racist thinking does not arise from ignorance or hate, he argues, but rather have been used to defend discriminatory policies and to rationalize the nation’s racial inequalities from wealth to health, and everything in between. His narrative offers a window on to the contentious debates raging on this issue in the United States and was awarded the National Book Award.
Now, his book has been turned into a Netflix documentary by the Academy Award-winning director Roger Ross Williams. It will premiere at IDFA later in the week. After hearing from Kendi about his work and its impact, Roger Ross Williams and Mara Brock Akil, the executive producer of the documentary, will join the conversation. We’ll also be showing some clips.
While racist ideas are easily produced and consumed, they can also be discredited. By shedding light on their murky history, Stamped from the Beginning offers tools to expose them, giving reason for hope.
Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, and the founding director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News racial justice contributor. He is the host of the new action podcast, Be Antiracist, and author of five #1 New York Times bestsellers, including Stamped from the Beginning and How to be an Antiracist. In 2020 he was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people and is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship (the ‘Genius Grant’) in 2021.
Roger Ross Williams is an Academy Award-winning director, producer and writer. He is the first African American to win an Oscar for his documentary Music by Prudence in 2009. He has worked on numerous award-winning documentary projects, including the television series on The 1619 Project, produced together with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones. Williams was previously at the John Adams Institute with his film American Jail.
Mara Brock Akil has written and produced 400+ episodes of television, leaving an immeasurable impact not only on Hollywood, but on the world for generations. Akil created the seminal television series Girlfriends, an honest exploration of the multi-faceted nature of Black womanhood, then developed the spin-off series The Game. She has since produced multiple culture shifting series that celebrate the complexity of humanity.
