Reviews with content warning for Homophobia - Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

My thoughts 💭: the author ties things together well throughout, and really shines a light on how racism evolved to stay ahead of laws against racism over time. It was a bit dry, but I'm also not a big history reader. It was also a thick book! The audiobook is 18 hours long.

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meganpbennett's review

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challenging emotional informative reflective slow-paced

5.0

Stamped from the Beginning is one of those books that you need to read, but you don't necessarily want to read. It's a slow, hard read, and it encourages (White) readers to look at their own thoughts, their own biases, to see what racist ideas they might fall into, whether or not they realize that the ideas or thoughts are racist. It makes people think about being antiracist, as opposed to simply being not racist, and yes, there is a difference. The book also looks at intersectionality and how multiple types and levels of oppression can 'intersect' and cause problems, and how the intersection of oppression can lead to more oppression of various groups.

My only complaint about Stamped is how Kendi introduces the reader to people. He will describe the person, saying where they were from, maybe what job they held, and why they are important in the moment they are mentioned. Only then will he name the person. Most of those paragraphs would have been much more powerful had the person in question been identified in the first sentence, instead of in the second or third sentence.

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rupl's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative reflective slow-paced

5.0

Dense, detailed look at US history from a lens completely overlooked in the US school system. You'll brush with basic facts you learned long ago, but their rich stories might be completely new. This book calmly yet passionately tells another US history, using five major characters to guide us through various eras.

I learned new parts of history and re-learned many others, all the while learning not to characterize individuals, but each of their actions. The book compiles countless examples of segregation, assimilation, and finally antiracism, from fleeting moments to entire legacies of individuals. By methodically reading from start to finish, and looking at example after example of each ideology I formed a better, more accurate view of history as it relates to power, racist policy erected to protect the powerful, and the racist ideas that get created in order to defend racist policies.

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nytephoenyx's review against another edition

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emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

Stamped From the Beginning is a hard-hitting account of racist ideas in America, starting with colonization and working forward through the Obama administration. Kendi discusses the different approaches to racial equality – segregationists, assimilationists, and antiracists. He also picks apart famous historical figures and shows the complexity of them – that the good ones had racist thoughts too.

I thought Stamped From the Beginning was an enlightening account of our history in this country. It’s not the story we’re told in high school history courses, but it should be. This three-dimensional painting of America’s racist ideas reveals a country that is deeply flawed and toxic, but still has the opportunity to change. America is an extremely patriotic country and most people have difficulty seeing its flaws. However, the only way we are going to be able to grow is to see those flaws and address them appropriately.

Kendi takes the reader chronologically through the years. I particularly enjoyed the parts on Abraham Lincoln (the white savior if you ever saw one, and not quite as pure-hearted as he is typically represented) and Angela Davis. Stamped From the Beginning addresses both male and female experiences, and even digs a little into the corrupt prison system.

While there is some intersectionality in this conversation, there is very little. Kendi discusses the male and female experience, but there was no conversation about the experiences of the Black LGBTQIAP+ community or the Black disabled community. There’s room to expand Stamped From the Beginning to be inclusive of these experiences as well.

As a professor and a historian, the things Kendi does present are extremely well-written and approachable to the average reader. Stamped From the Beginning should be taught in AP History classes in high schools at the very least, because it’s important for our education system to be more inclusive if we as a country are going to affect change in any venue. His cadence in the book is steady, the narrative is direct, and the pacing is good. I was never bored, and I learned things every time I listened to the audiobook.

I picked up Stamped From the Beginning because I read Jason Reynold’s remix of the book, Stamped, earlier this year, and I’m glad I did. While Stamped makes these facts more accessible to younger readers, you really don’t get the full picture unless you read the original text. I recommend both depending the reader, but Stamped From the Beginning truly paints a broader picture of the unpleasant truth of American history.

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sherbertwells's review

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challenging dark informative reflective slow-paced

4.0

“Time and again, racist ideas have not been cooked up from the boiling pot of ignorance and hate. Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era’s racial disparities away from those policies and onto Black people.”

Stamped from the Beginning is brilliant, not only in its content but its form.

I expected Ibram X. Kendi’s award-winning nonfiction book to retell American history with scholarly nuance and antiracist passion. And it does that, exploring forgotten corners of history and examining famous figures in a new light.

Stamped from the Beginning is subtitled “The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” and that history is long and complicated. According to Kendi, historical and present-day antiracists have contended not only against segregationist theories, which blame Black people for the discrimination they experience, but assimiliationist ones, which agknowledge racism but force Black people to conform to a white cultural standard. Chritianity and the “natural laws” of the Enlightenment, slavery and Reaganomics, sociology and fiction have acted as tools of opression, even under the guise of “uplift suasion.” To guide the readers through such diverse eras and media, Kendi focuses on five “main characters”: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. DuBois and Angela Davis, each of whom progressed racist and/or antiracist discourse.

Kendi is nuanced as heck. He introduces modern antiracist concepts like intersectionality and outdated racist theories like polygensis with the same precision. He acknowledges that segregationist, assimilationist and antiracist theories often coexisted within the same people or groups. While he’s not afraid to examine the racist ideas held by American icons across the political spectrum (Eugene Debs makes a surprise appearance!), he’s more interested in explaining than condemning.

“Frankly speaking, for generations of Americans, racist ideas have been their common sense. The simple logic of racist ideas has manipulated millions over the years, muffling the more complex antiracist reality again and again” (4)

According to the acknowledgements, Kendi began Stamped from the Beginning as a history of Black Studies in academia, but, like Tolstoy writing War and Peace, got carried away with context. Remarkably, he chose to turn his scholarly expertise into a work of popular history. Aside from a few unwieldy metaphors—Africans who believed in ethnic hierarchies “smacked the racist chicken and enjoyed its racist eggs”—the prose is both scholarly and readable (83). By examining Kendi’s style and line of reasoning, I learned a lot about how to write nonfiction for a nonacademic audience.

Of course, Stamped from the Beginning isn’t absolutely perfect. For one, most of the racist ideas Kendi covers are anti-Black, and other minorities (and racist ideas about them) are only mentioned in passing. He also argues that “media suasion” failed to improve the public image of African Americans, while racist works like Gone with the Wind and The Birth of a Nation fueled prejudice, without explaining the difference. But these complains merely agknowledge the breath of scholarship that has yet to be done—or that I have yet to encounter.

When Four Hundred Souls, a nonfiction collection edited by Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, comes out in paperback, I will purchase it without hesitation. While Kendi argues that discrimination precedes racist ideas, antiracist works like Stamped from the Beginning are essential for building a better future.

“No power lasts forever. There will come a time when Americans will realize that the only thing wrong with Black people is that they think something is wrong with Black people. There will come a time wehn racist ideas will no longer obstruct us from seeing the complete and utter abnormality of racial disparities. There will come a time when we will love humanity, when we will gain the courage to fight for an equitable society for our beloved humanity, knowing, intelligently, that when we fight for humanity, we are fighting for ourselves. There will come a time. Maybe, just maybe, that time is now” (511)

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anigoose's review

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challenging emotional informative slow-paced

5.0

I have both the audiobook and ebook, and I just wanted to share that I struggled a little with the audiobook. It was edited a little patchily and there would be audible (lol) differences between sound quality for sometimes just a word inserted into a sentence, or for a sentence in a paragraph. There are also occasional mouth sounds in the recording. If you are ND and have sensory issues this might be a problem for you. I could only listen with binaural beats in the background and whilst doing something like knitting.

It's not a knock on those who made it, or even a complaint, just a head's up for other folks with sensory processing issues!

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