92 min | R | November 10, 2023 | Netflix
Ibram X. Kendi’s history of racist ideas gets adapted into a documentary with one inverted claim. Racist policy comes first and the ideas arrive later to justify it. The film stops asking what is wrong with Black people and starts asking who profited from the question.
Stamped from the Beginning adapts Ibram X. Kendi’s history of anti-Black racist ideas into a documentary that argues a single inverted thesis. Racist policy comes first. Racist ideas arrive afterward to justify it. The film opens on a question that has been asked of Black Americans for centuries. What is wrong with Black people? Roger Ross Williams turns the question back on the people who keep asking it.
The film is built on scholars who speak directly to camera. Angela Davis appears as herself and traces the logic of racist ideas with the patience of someone who has spent a lifetime dismantling them. Ibram X. Kendi sits as himself and walks through his own argument without performing certainty. Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, Brittany Packnett, and Jennifer L. Morgan fill out the chorus of voices, each pinning the abstract history to a specific human cost. Alexa Rachelle Jennings plays Harriet Jacobs in dramatized passages that give the testimony a body and a face. Rafa Marinho plays Gomes de Zurara, the fifteenth-century chronicler the film names as the first writer to sell the lie.
Roger Ross Williams directs and David Teague writes a film that refuses the standard documentary grammar. Talking heads give way to animation that renders centuries of history in shifting visual styles. The animated sequences do not illustrate the interviews. They carry the argument when no archival footage exists. Teague structures the history around the people who manufactured racist ideas rather than the people who suffered them. The editing threads scholarship, dramatization, and animation into a single line of reasoning that never loses its thread.
This is a film of ideas that takes its form as seriously as its content. It asks the audience to follow a centuries-long argument and trusts them to keep up. The thesis is uncomfortable because it removes the comfort of treating racism as ignorance to be educated away. Williams builds a primer that is intellectually demanding and visually inventive. It works as both history lesson and indictment of the people who wrote the history.