Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
Author: Ibram X. Kendi
Publisher: Bold Type Books
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Cover Description
The National Book Award winning history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society. Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America--it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit.
In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. He uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to drive this history: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary activist Angela Davis. As Kendi shows, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. They were created to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial inequities.In shedding light on this history, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose racist thinking. In the process, he gives us reason to hope.
TL;DR Review
Stamped From the Beginning taught me so much more than any other book I’ve ever read about antiracism. It’s long, but very worth the process of working through it slowly.
For you if: You live anywhere in the United States.
Full Review
First, I have to thank @melanatedreader and her co-hosts on Instagram for initiating what might have been the largest group read of all time — certainly the most impactful. Thank you, also, to everyone who joined the Zoom discussions about this book, for everything you helped me learn even more deeply.
As a person who seeks out books as a means of learning anything, and as a person who does her best to be antiracist, I have read a lot of books about privilege, racism, and taking action. Many of those books were great. But none of them have connected the dots for me like Stamped From the Beginning. None of them have taught me so much or helped me to see like this.
If you are white and looking to “do the work” when it comes to fighting against racism — internal and external — reading this book is that.
The Reading Experience
Over the course of 550 pages, Dr. Kendi narrates this history of racism in the US, starting with the beginning of the slave trade by Europeans and ending with Barak Obama’s election (as this book was originally published while he was still in office). Kendi deftly divides all this history into five major sections, each one centered on the life and influence of a central figure, whom he dubs our “tour guides” — Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis.
While the book is about history, it reads much more approachably than a textbook. But it also begs to be lingered over and digested. I often listen to audiobooks, especially nonfiction, and usually it’s a great medium for me. But I didn’t get very far into the audiobook before I decided to change gears and buy a print copy so that I could annotate and highlight as I went. In fact, the hosts of the reading group suggested a highlighting system (orange for a negative emotion, pink for a positive emotion, yellow for new vocabulary, blue for a new event, green for important facts and figures, and purple for memorable quotes), and subscribing to it absolutely transformed my reading experience. Slowing down to consider each thing I highlighted, to process why the information stuck out to me and to decide which color to use, helped me process and digest the information. I’ll be continuing to use a system like this when I read certain nonfiction in the future.
It’s not perfect. For example, Dr. Kendi does not give nearly enough attention to the Black women who’ve helped the movement; he sort of mentions most of them as an afterthought. And when he wrote this a few years ago, he couldn’t anticipate the mindset of 2020, so certain information we might be hungry about today is lacking. But overall, this is an incredible feat of research, empathy, and education.
Takeaways
I’ve never been particularly drawn to history as a subject; it was one of my least favorites in school. So I’ve never studied a swath of history through a specific lens before, as this book uses race. Looking at history this way was so incredibly valuable, because that’s what really lets you put the pieces together in your mind — that’s where the revelations come from.
I learned that almost all the people who have fought against racism have held certain deeply racist beliefs, but that some of them truly transformed over the course of their lives — particularly W.E.B. Du Bois. This showed me that “cancel culture” can sometimes be hasty, at least when the person in question had good intentions. Intentions are important to keep in mind when it comes to whether someone deserves to be “canceled” for opinions they held in the past.
I learned that the United States is not like other countries — we have always been particularly and embarrassingly racist. In fact, the reason racism was a priority for the government during the Civil Rights movement was really because we were in the Cold War and the US’s racism was an international embarrassment — we couldn’t brand ourselves “leader of the free world” while everyone saw how we treated Black people.
I learned that even the people we think are good guys had deeply racist motives — did you know that Abraham Lincoln had a massive federal budget set aside to deport Black people to Africa once he freed them from slavery (“colonization”)? He only freed them, anyway, because whenever he did so, they turned against the Confederate soldiers and helped him win the war.
I learned that the Black Power movement in the 60s and 70s and today’s Black Lives Matter movement are eerily, incredibly the same. All the progress that had been made was completely wiped out, and then some, by Reagonomics, the competition between Democrats and Republicans for who could be the most “tough on crime,” and the infamous war on drugs. I knew about these things, but not their extent. Did you know that Reagan sent 2.2 million Americans (across races) into poverty in the first year of his presidency?
But most of all, I learned Dr. Kendi’s main point: that racism is not the root cause of prejudice. Self-interest is the root cause. Self-interested people create racist policies, and then they make up racist reasons to defend them, and then people believe the racist reasons and become prejudice. This has happened again and again and again. And the limited progress that’s been made throughout history was also fueled by self-interest, not by altruism. Caring about our fellow humans has not dismantled the things that hold Black people back. It didn’t work on its own before, and it’s not going to work on its own in the future. But dismantling racist policies is good for everyone, including poor and middle-class white people. And until we can convince our leaders to be self-interested in undoing racist policies, we won’t get anywhere. Fixing the policies MUST come first, and THEN people will begin to believe that they are no longer needed. It just won’t happen the other way around.
Please, please buy yourself a copy of this. Take as long as you need to read it, little by little. It will be worth it, I promise.