7 movies you can stream right now if you're trying to understand what it means to be an anti-racist

"Moonlight."A24

• Black Lives Matter protests spread across the country and the world after George Floyd was killed in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25.
• Anti-racism is an effort to consciously work against systemic racism.
• To practice anti-racism, one must learn about how racial oppression and inequality have shaped the country's history.
• Business Insider spoke with Samantha Sheppard, an assistant film professor at Cornell University with an academic focus on Black cultural production and African American cinema, about how films can help people understand anti-racism.
• Sheppard said that people can watch films that talk about American history, the Black experience, and even racist films to learn about how racism exists and functions.
• Here are some of Sheppard's film recommendations for learning what it means to be anti-racist.

There is no such thing as a "non-racist" person, racism scholar Ibram X. Kendi says. Rather, people are either racist or anti-racist, because there is no room to be neutral. To be anti-racist, one must consciously work against racism, Robert J. Patterson, professor of African American Studies at Georgetown University, previously told Business Insider.

Start your anti-racist work by educating yourself. One way to educate yourself is through films, according to Samantha Sheppard. Sheppard teaches film at Cornell University, with a focus on Black cultural production.

Some of these films explore the beauty, pleasure, pain, and politics of Blackness and others have the power to teach you "the ways Hollywood has framed and tried to reframe Black people into very small categories and representational tropes," Sheppard told Business Insider.

Sheppard added that you can even do anti-racist work by watching racist films and paying attention to the ways that the film is supporting racism. You have to interact with the film to do so.

Two of Sheppard's recommended films aren't currently available online but are valuable to watch. "The Spook Who Sat by the Door," a 1973 film about a Black man who has an apprenticeship with the C.I.A. and uses what he learns to organize a Black Revolution, is "perhaps one of the most powerful films that has ever existed" in Sheppard's opinion. Another is "Killer of Sheep", a film about a financially frustrated Black boy who works at a slaughterhouse and lives in the neighborhood of Watts, Los Angeles, in the mid-1970s. These films, Sheppard said, can help viewers understand Black pain and politics.

Here are seven other movies you can stream right now to get you started, listed in order of release date.