“What is wrong with black people?” These are the first words spoken in “Stamped from the Beginning,” a new Netflix “documentary.” The film was adapted from the bestseller, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, by self-proclaimed antiracist “intellectual” Ibram X. Kendi.
Directed by Roger Ross Williams, who helmed Hulu’s adaptation of “The 1619 Project,” the film is a whirlwind tour through six centuries of racism to trace the origins of “anti-blackness.” It has received fawning praise from the media, which have lauded it as “heart-poundingly persuasive,” “radical,” and “well-paced and affecting.” It is not shocking that it earned such acclaim from the leftist press, nor that Netflix greenlit the feature. What is shocking, however, is how genuinely terrible the end product is.
Radical Black Women Only
There is a plethora of issues with the film, starting with the experts chosen to provide commentary. Kendi himself is the primary narrator, but he is joined by an all-star cast of hard-left activists and professors — all black women. Williams stated in interviews that this was deliberately meant to reinforce the message of the film. He decided to “only use Black women”: “Black women were always the forefront of the resistance movement and, in my eyes, never get their due.”
Reviewers have praised the talking heads as “speak[ing] with a bracing candour unlikely to be found on PBS or the BBC.” This includes such lines as, “Thomas Jefferson was full of sh-t,” and, “When
