Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

by Ibram X Kendi

Overview

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION

Americans like to insist that we are living in a postracial, color-blind society. In fact, racist thought is alive and well; it has simply become more sophisticated and more insidious. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, racist ideas in this country 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. Stamped from the Beginning uses the lives of five major American intellectuals to offer a window into the contentious debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists. From Puritan minister Cotton Mather to Thomas Jefferson, from fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to brilliant scholar W. E. B. Du Bois to legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis, Kendi shows how and why some of our leading proslavery and pro-civil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America.

As Kendi provocatively illustrates, racist thinking did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Racist ideas were created and popularized in an effort to defend deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and to rationalize the nation's racial inequities in everything from wealth to health. While racist ideas are easily produced and easily consumed, they can also be discredited. In shedding much-needed light on the murky history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose them-and in the process, gives us reason to hope.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781568585987
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	08/15/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	608
Sales rank:	712
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Ibram X. Kendi is a professor of history and international relations and the founding director of the Anti-Racist Research and Policy Center at American University. He authored the 2016 National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning and the award-winning The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972. He has received research fellowships, grants, and visiting appointments from a variety of universities, foundations, professional associations, and libraries, including the American Historical Association, Library of Congress, National Academy of Education, Spencer Foundation, Lyndon B. Johnson Library & Museum, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, Brown University, Princeton University, Duke University, University of Chicago, and UCLA. Before entering academia, he worked as a journalist. His writings appeared in The Virginian-Pilot, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Philadelphia Weekly, and Orlando Sentinel, among other publications. As a professor, he has contributed pieces to a number of publications, including Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Root.com. He lives in Washington, DC.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition ix

Prologue 1

Part I Cotton Mather

1 Human Hierarchy 15

2 Origins of Racist Ideas 22

3 Coming to America 31

4 Saving Souls, Not Bodies 47

5 Black Hunts 58

6 Great Awakening 66

Part II Thomas Jefferson

7 Enlightenment 79

8 Black Exhibits 92

9 Created Equal 104

10 Uplift Suasion 120

11 Big Bottoms 135

12 Colonization 143

Part III William Lloyd Garrison

13 Gradual Equality 161

14 Imbruted or Civilized 177

15 Soul 191

16 The Impending Crisis 202

17 History's Emancipator 214

18 Ready for Freedom? 223

19 Reconstructing Slavery 235

20 Reconstructing Blame 248

Part IV W. E. B. Du Bois

21 Renewing the South 263

22 Southern Horrors 269

23 Black Judases 280

24 Great White Hopes 295

25 The Birth of a Nation 308

26 Media Suasion 323

27 Old Deal 335

28 Freedom Brand 349

29 Massive Resistance 365

Part V Angela Davis

30 The Act of Civil Rights 381

31 Black Power 393

32 Law and Order 410

33 Reagan's Drugs 424

34 New Democrats 440

35 New Republicans 456

36 99.9 Percent the Same 469

37 The Extraordinary Negro 482

Epilogue 497

Acknowledgments 513

Notes 516

Index 562

Editorial Reviews

"Blending deep research and analysis with a powerfully intimate and personal voice, Kendi...renders this work of intellectual history as compelling as the juiciest biography."—Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher

02/15/2016
Kendi (African American history, Univ. of Florida; The Black Campus Movement) argues that deep beliefs in differences between blacks and whites reach back beyond America's colonial beginnings, and in order to explain the disparities that have persisted in white supremacy and black subordination, suggests that three distinct sets of voices—segregationists, assimilationists, and antiracists—have defined the dominant opinions. Segregationists and assimilationists represent obverse sides of the same coin in Kendi's view. Both accept the stamp of blackness as inferiority: one maintaining that it is biological and cannot be eradicated, the other contending it is behavioral and can be uprooted. Antiracists have rejected the concept by embracing human differences. Using examples ranging from the 1600s to the present, the author exposes the ideas that have formed the foundation of racial discrimination, employing as tour guides prominent Americans such as Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis. VERDICT Kendi's provocative egalitarian argument combines prodigious reading and research with keen insights into the manipulative power of racist ideologies that suppress the recognition of diversity. This is a must for serious readers of American history, politics, or social thought.—Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe

Library Journal

★ 2016-01-02
An accomplished history of racist thought and practice in the United States from the Puritans to the present. Anyone who thought that the 2008 election of President Barack Obama marked the emergence of post-racial America has been sorely disillusioned in the subsequent years with seemingly daily reminders of the schism wrought by racism and white supremacy. And yet anyone with even a cursory understanding of this country's tortured history with race should have known better. In this tour de force, Kendi (African-American History/Univ. of Florida; The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972, 2012) explores the history of racist ideas—and their connection with racist practices—across American history. The author uses five main individuals as "tour guides" to investigate the development of racist ideas throughout the history of the U.S.: the preacher and intellectual Cotton Mather, Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, ardent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, and activist Angela Davis. Kendi also poses three broad schools of thought regarding racial matters throughout American history: segregationist, assimilationist, and anti-racist. Although this trio can be reductionist, it provides a solid framework for understanding the interplay between racist ideas, anti-racism, and the attempts to synthesize them—"assimilationism," which the author ultimately identifies as simply another form of racism, even when advocated by African-Americans. The subtitle of the book promises a "definitive history," but despite the book's more than 500 pages of text, its structure and its viewing of racial ideas through the lens of five individuals means that it is almost necessarily episodic. Although it is a fine history, the narrative may best be read as an extended, sophisticated, and sometimes (justifiably) angry essay. Racism is the enduring scar on the American consciousness. In this ambitious, magisterial book, Kendi reveals just how deep that scar cuts and why it endures, its barely subcutaneous pain still able to flare.

Kirkus Reviews