When Oscar-winning filmmaker Roger Ross Williams first read the book ‘Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History Of Racist Ideas in America,’ he was shocked. As a Black American, he thought he knew plenty already about racism in America but author Ibram X. Kendi gave him new insights into the deep-rooted causes of that racism.
“When I first read the book, I think the thing that most got to me was that a lot of these racist ideas are disseminated through popular culture, movies, TV shows and the media, and popular culture from the past, paintings and art,” Williams states. “After reading the book, I saw the world differently. I also saw how I had fallen victim to these racist ideas and how I believed them.”
His new film, based on the book, has just received its European premiere at IDFA and launched this week on Netflix.
In the film, Williams asks his interviewees, mainly Black women academics, authors and activists, a leading question: can you please tell me what is wrong with Black people? It’s unanswerable. The interviewees laugh or ask what the question means. The director is exploring the roots of the discrimination and violence that runs through US history while unpicking the crude arguments used to justify centuries of inequality.
School history lessons don’t teach young Americans that figures like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were, in fact, racists.
“We are taught that Abraham Lincoln is a hero and the is someone who freed the slaves. We are taught a very simple narrative,” Williams observes of the “mythology of America and American presidents” pumped out in American classrooms. “We are not really given all the facts and information…”
That’s why Williams found the book ‘Stamped From The Beginning’ “so eye opening, so shocking…When I read it, a lot of this stuff I didn’t know – because I hadn’t been taught [it].”
Huge amounts of archive material are used in the film, everything from clips of King Kong to chilling old photos of lynchings and even some animation. “It was a daunting task,” the director sighs as he contemplates the enormous effort required to pull all the images together. He pays tribute to his archivists, his producer Alis Paine, and writer David Teague. “It took three years to make this film. It wasn’t overnight. It was a long process of assembling all these images, creating a narrative structure around it, an argument, and then really focusing that argument.”
The intention was to make the film accessible and even entertaining in spite of the grim subject matter. That’s why Williams includes clips from ‘The Simpsons’ and old Hollywood movies. “I love that we use the same tools that are used to poison our minds with these racist ideas,” he says of how he and his team turn narrative conventions on their head.
The doc shines light on some largely forgotten figures in US Black cultural history, for example the 18th Century poet Phyllis Wheatley who was born in West Africa; abolitionist and author Harriet Jacobs’; and the journalist and civil rights activist Ida B Wells, born into slavery but who, in the 1890s, exposed the full horror of lynching.
“No, I did not know who Phyllis Wheatley was. I did not know that story. I really didn’t even know the story of Harriet Jacobs. That is why the book was so eye-opening for me,” the director acknowledges. He knew the work of Ida B Wells through his involvement in The 1619 Project, a docuseries put together by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times Magazine, and partly inspired by Wells.
The director believes many of these names will also be new to viewers who watch Stamped From The Beginning on Netflix. “That is why I made this film, because I wanted this scholarship to be accessible to the broadest audience possible.”
Williams is hoping that having the film on a major streaming platform will challenge viewers who still cling to old racists views. He points out that ‘Stamped From The Beginning’ and Kendi’s latest book ‘How To Be An Antiracist’ “are probably two of the most banned books in America, banned in many states.” He describes Kendi as “enemy number one” in Texas, Florida and others conservative southern states.
“There’s a whole movement in America to erase and not have a discussion around slavery, black history and critical race theory,” Williams notes of the attempts to draw a veil over historical injustices.
The books may be hard to find in many school libraries across many States but, as the director notes, you can’t ban Netflix.
Williams is one of the most prolific filmmakers around. This year alone, he has released Cassandro starring Gael Garcia Bernal as a gay Mexican wrestler; documentary Love To Love You, Donna Summer (co-directed with Brooklyn Sudano), and doc series The Super Models. He has also been working on his food series High On The Hog. He credits the team at his production company One Story Up with enabling him to take on so many assignments. He also points out that his new projects all took several years to complete. “All of this stuff takes time,” he notes.
It isn’t just racism in the US which preoccupies Williams. He spends a lot of time in the Netherlands and also made a 2015 short for CNN about the Dutch character Black Pete, part of the long-standing ‘Sinterklaas’ tradition.
“Stamped From The Beginning starts in Portugal. The original racist idea, the creation of Blackness and the inferiority of Black people, started in Europe and still today exists in Europe. It is just that America also embraced it and built a country around it,” the director observes.
Williams lives in New York but has a Dutch partner. Stamped From The Beginning received a standing ovation at its Dutch premiere last week but Williams remains wary about what might happen now in US politics. There’s a possibility that Donald Trump, who features prominently in the documentary, might make it back to the White House and that it will still take time to reach an “anti-racist society.”
In one area of American life, there is already evidence of progressive change. Since the controversy over #OscarsSoWhite almost a decade ago, the Academy Awards have become far more inclusive. Williams has been one of the figures who has ensured this has happened.
“Hollywood has always been a disseminator of racist ideas and racist movies. It is founded on that,” he says, citing DW Griffith’s racist blockbuster The Birth Of A Nation (1915) as evidence. However, he was on the board of governors of the Academy for eight years and fought hard to diversify the membership of the documentary branch of the Academy, inviting many more international members, and members of colour, to join.
“We are now the most diverse branch in the Academy,” he states. Gender parity has also been achieved. This is one small example of how positive reform can be achieved. Now, Williams hopes, his new documentary will challenge entrenched opinions and encourage white America to confront its own chequered and racist history.
