Whitewashed

WHITEWASHED is the story of Eugenics, as promoted by Leland Stanford Jr. University's first president, David Starr Jordan, and how this theory's history was covered up and only recently revealed. The film will also finally shed light on the mysterious death of Stanford University’s co-founder Jane Stanford, who was at odds with the administration.

WHITEWASHED is also an example of how institutional racism can be addressed and countered.

Eugenics—or the idea of being ‘good birth’— was coined by Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton who proposed that we can improve the human condition by only allowing the ‘fittest’ (primarily white, Northern Europeans) to reproduce, while sterilizing the unfit who included certain other races, the mentally and physically infirm. At the dawn of the 20th century it became a widely accepted concept that many intellectuals had embraced, and was even taught as a science in nearly 400 colleges and universities in the United States, including Harvard, the University of California, Columbia, and Stanford Universities.

Narrated by a well-known Stanford graduate, the film features interviews with historians and other experts, supported by archival footage, and a custom music and soundtrack. The film tells the story of how early eugenicists led by Stanford’s then President David Starr Jordan played an important although little-known role in the propagation of the eugenics movement, ultimately becoming adopted in the nineteen-thirties by the German National Socialist party. In 2020, led by undergraduate student Ben Maldonado, Stanford undertook a campaign to rid the campus of its eugenicists’ past, but not without consequence, and the revelation of who likely killed Jane Stanford.

A film by Berry Minott