STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING - Mark Reviews Movies

Stamped from the Beginning, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 9, 2023

Stamped from the Beginning starts with a loaded question: "What's wrong with Black people?" That's not the real question director Roger Ross Williams' documentary sets out to answer, of course, but the provocation, posited to multiple academics and historians, gets at the long history of race, as the concept was invented, and racism throughout history and specifically within the United States.

The real question examined here is something else: What's wrong with a history and a world that assumes there is something inherently wrong with people based on traits literally as skin deep as the color of a person's skin? The resulting film is a wide-reaching exploration of how the idea of distinct races of human beings began and the consequences of separating people in such a superficial way. We know the results. We still live with them, yet in starting at the beginning, the film and its interviewees deconstruct that history in such a way that the connections of past and present racism are made precisely and concisely.

The material and thesis here come from Ibram X. Kendi's book of the same name, subtitled The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. The film itself is akin to a visual essay of sorts, giving us various chapters, assorted experts, and dramatized examples of certain points, often using animation presented in a style that matches the art of the period in question.

For example, the tale of Phillis Wheatley, a poet whose collected works were published a few years before the start of the Revolutionary War, is presented as an oil painting in motion. Meanwhile, the history of Bacon's Rebellion about a century early unfolds as rotoscoped ink drawings against aged, yellow paper. The style here is more or less inconsequential, compared to the content of these stories, anecdotes, and case studies, but it is notable that Williams makes the effort of bringing some life to this history, instead of simply relying on the words of its experts, archival documentation, and photographic and video evidence.

Those connections are key. Take, again, Wheatley's example. She was a Black poet, whose book of poetry was published in 1773, only to face skepticism and doubt about being the author. By the time her story arrives here, Kendi and multiple other interviewees have taken apart racist notions of art and intellectual exercises being the exclusive territory of a "superior" race of, specifically, men. The point here isn't that Wheatley demolished that unfounded idea, because plenty of men and women before her and since have done so. It's more about the doubt on the part of the white elite at the time, who arranged a tribunal to investigate whether or not Wheatley did write that poetry.

The answer, obviously, is that Wheatley was the author, but the affront is the interrogation itself. More to the point, that affront still continues in various ways, with Williams intercutting the re-creation scenes involving Wheatley with footage of Anita Hill's testimony at a U.S. Senate hearing about her claims of sexual harassment.

Women participating in the interviews for the documentary point out that they have had their own "Phillis Wheatley moment," when their credentials, honesty, or some other accomplishment or quality has been called into question, simply because they happen to be Black women. Willliams' inclusion of so many women within the team of experts here is noteworthy in general, because it offers a perspective that allows for a more detailed examination of the intersection of race and gender, and for this particular moment specifically.

Much of the film is about other intersections—mainly the past and the present. The whole notion of white supremacy, for example, emerged because a Portuguese prince in the 1400s and his biographer created a false narrative about the populations of Africa, in order to justify the buying and selling of human beings from that continent. Kendi and others argue that the notion of race began with that narrative, and from there, various assumptions, prejudices, stereotypes, and other dehumanization tactics and notions emerged, persisted, and, in certain ways, remain to this day.

The film presents them, not only so that we can see and understand them as the result of a big lie that began centuries ago, but also so that can be dissected and contradicted by way of those more positive stories. There are harsh realities presented in this film, from footage of racist marches as recent as a few year ago to an unflinching discussion of lynching following Emancipation. Even within the context of such horrors, though, the film looks to Ida B. Wells, who made a thorough documentation of lynching throughout the United States during the height of such terrorism—at a time when no one else would, either out of fear or in order to deny it. Truth-tellers are essential. A truth-teller who would risk her life in the pursuit of the truth is as rare as one comes.

In its own and detailed way, Stamped from the Beginning seeks and tells many truths, too, as it examines, reveals, and demolishes centuries' worth of the history of race as a social construct and the myths that came and persist from it. Yes, there has been observable and noteworthy change in that regard, but for many, it is still a matter of life or death. The film makes that point clear, too, in case recent history hasn't proven it.

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