Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (National Book Award Winner)
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 racist 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.
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Community Reviews
As any effective book on a subject like racism should do, this one challenges the reader to examine different perspectives. Kendi's careful and thorough method of raising these perspectives made those challenges thought-provoking rather than confrontational. I especially appreciated the epilogue for a concise summary to tie the previous 500 pages together, identify methods of dealing with racism that seemed logical but have proven ineffective, and set a hopeful course of action for addressing racism for the benefit of all humanity.
In later sections, however, the history is both more thorough and more interesting. I really appreciated Part V, in particular, for filling out my knowledge of recent American history in several surprising places.
Definitely a recommended read, but I do also recommend a bit of a skeptical eye.
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