Independent Lens
Ratified
Ratified brings to life the push to add the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution through the legal battle in Virginia—the final state needed to ratify the amendment.
The History of White People in America
Through musical animated shorts, The History of White People in America tells the history of how skin became race, and race became power.
- Series
- World Channel Presentation
- Premiere Date
- July 6, 2020
- Length
- 6 episodes x 6 minutes
- Funding Initiative
- Short-Form Open Call
Director
Ed Bell
Ed Bell is a filmmaker, creative director, and animation artist trained by mavericks Ralph Bakshi and Brad Bird. As a commercial director at Wild Brain, he developed various TV and film projects. He also contributed as a director on HBO's Good Night Moon & Other Sleepytime Tales, which won an Emmy Award.
Director
Pierce Freelon
Pierce Freelon is a two-time Grammy®-nominated artist, author, podcaster, and ice cream maker. He co-created the PBS Kids podcast Jamming on the Job and Beat Making Lab, an Emmy Award-winning web series. An Afrofuturist entrepreneur, Pierce founded Blackspace, a digital makerspace for teens and Coco Fro, a vegan, freeze-dried ice cream company.
Director
Jonathan Halperin
Jon Halperin is a three-time Emmy Award-winning filmmaker. He has produced, directed, written, and overseen documentaries for Netflix, Amazon, PBS, National Geographic, Time, ITVS, TED, and Discovery. He co-runs Room 608, a New York production company.
Director
Aaron Keane
Aaron Keane started his 25-year career in audio engineering as a musician and recording engineer, working with diverse musical artists. Now he composes music for TV, film, and digital media. Credits include music composition for the Emmy Award-winning PBS series Twice Born and short films for TED Science and Wonder.
Director
Drew Takahashi
Drew Takahashi is the emperor of Funjacket Enterprises, and was previously co-founder and chief creative officer of Colossal Pictures. He has worked on broadcast identities, commercials, music videos, and interfaces. Drew continues to design and direct corporate communications, transformative games, and animated portions of documentaries.
Producer
Clementine Briand
Clementine Briand is a multimedia producer working across corporate videos, TV, and film, with a focus on nonfiction. She has produced for ITVS and freelanced on projects like The History of White People (Tribeca) and Personhood (DOC NYC). After earning her master's degree in Berlin, she founded Farrago, a nonfiction artist collective.
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The Film
Through the entertaining and engaging lens of musical animated shorts, The History of White People in America examines how skin color has come to define race in the United States. Episode 1 introduces viewers to Virginians' invention of the white “race” in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. Episode 2 picks up the exploration a few decades later with an African man and an English woman—husband and wife—singing about the fate of their future as new laws render their love illegal. In Episode 3, President Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and one of their five children share illuminating insights on how skin became color, color became race, and race became power. Episode 4 features Afong Moy, the nation’s first Chinese woman, who is exhibited as a circus oddity in 1830s New York, while episode 5 focuses on Ann Williams, a woman born into slavery who won freedom for herself and her children in 1832 after leaping from a third-floor tavern window in an act of desperation and defiance. Lastly, episode 6 explores the ties between citizenship and race with the passing of the Alien Naturalization Act by Congress in 1790, which excluded anyone who was not white from becoming a citizen.
Viewed collectively, these shorts capture what it means to be American—that “us” and “them” are constantly redefined, that racial history deserves contemplation, and that Americans are bound by rich differences in experience and identity.
