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

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Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

9 reviews

asainspace's review

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informative reflective medium-paced

4.5

Comprehensive, useful, readable history of anti-Black racism in America.

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bookcheshirecat's review

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4.0

“The principal function of racist ideas in American history has been the suppression of resistance to racial discrimination and its resulting racial disparities. The beneficiaries of slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration have produced racist ideas of Black people being best suited for or deserving of the confines of slavery, segregation, or the jail cell. Consumers of these racist ideas have been led to believe there is something wrong with Black people, and not the policies that have enslaved, oppressed, and confined so many Black people.”

➽ Stamped is a comprehensible history about race and racism in America! I read the version retold by Jason Reynolds and wasn’t satisfied with how it modernized and left out important aspects of history. Therefore I was planning on reading the original version by Ibram X. Kendi, as it dives much deeper into the historical background and important key figures of the different eras! I enjoyed listening to the audiobook and learning more about the topic, though there was a lot of information and things I’d have to reread in the future to fully take them in!

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ladygetslit's review

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challenging informative reflective slow-paced

5.0

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tangleroot_eli's review against another edition

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challenging informative inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

A powerful, challenging, and necessary read.

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kyrstin_p1989's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

This book takes us from our nation’s inception through the presidency of Barack Obama. It highlights three main race ideologies and explicates about each one over the decades. Segregationists, those who believe Black folx are genetically inferior and don’t believe in equality; assimilationists, who believe that Black people need to try harder to become better people (aka more white); and antiracists, who believe that systems of inequality and discrimination have always been the culprit of inequity in American society. This book points out that both segregationists and assimilationists are racist, even if the latter would try to have you believe otherwise. I learned a lot about our country’s history, policies, and leaders that will help inform my continued efforts to be antiracist moving forward and will help me focus on Black freedom in this country and beyond.

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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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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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rubybooks's review

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challenging emotional informative medium-paced

5.0

I've been wanting to read this book for a while, so I placed a hold from my library for the audiobook. It finally came through this month, and I loved this so much. I've really been loving listening to non-fiction audiobooks, especially because for me it feels like someone is explaining the topic directly to me. In my opinion this worked really well for Stamped from the Beginning - it kept me engaged the whole time, and it's a long book, but I found all the information interesting and also easy to understand.

I made quite a few notes while I was reading, mainly because I was listening to the audiobook. I definitely also want to buy a physical copy so I can tab and annotate. I think this is the type of book that you should read multiple times because even though I write down some thoughts, there are probably details that I missed. And this is a long book that covers SO much! It's really hard to summarise all my thoughts into this review, but I'll talk about a few notable topics that stood out for me. I might update this review if I get a physical copy and reread it.

Stamped from the Beginning covers a huge length of time, from the colonisation of America to the present day and Obama's presidency. This is probably what I appreciated most about this book - it covered a huge amount of time, but didn't compromise on depth. I sometimes struggle with non-fiction "survey" books because they lack detail, but that was not the case with this book. Kendi discusses so many events, topics, and themes, some of which were already known to me and some weren't. Early on there is a discussion of the American civil war, the middle passage, independence, the great migration, and the history of lynching, as well as so many more things, such as an examination of famous figures like Thomas Jefferson.

I was happy that I did know a lot of what Kendi was referencing, such as the works of Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Patrisse Khan-Cullors. Kendi also talks about Black lesbians (and Black queer people in general), and he talks a lot about gender racism and I loved this attention on topics that have often been overlooked. After reading a few anti-racist non-fiction books I'm also getting better at remembering details about early colonial American history, as well as later events such as Ronald Reagan's war on drugs. Even then, there is so much for me to learn more about, especially as I'm not American so I didn't learn American history in school.

I really valued the discussion of multiculturalism vs assimilation vs anti-racism, which I briefly learned about in a politics class a few years ago. I hadn't properly considered how the desegregation of schools was assimilationist, as Black children were bussed to white schools and not the other way around. I also learned much more about W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X through Kendi's analysis. And even though I have read some of Angela Davis's work, I really want to read Are Prisons Obsolete? and I also have The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander borrowed because I definitely want to educate myself more on mass incarceration.

There is so much from this book that I didn't even mention here, so I would highly recommend just reading this for yourself. It's a must-read for everyone, especially if you're looking to read more non-fiction and anti-racist literature. I also own a physical copy of How to be an Antiracist, so I'm looking forward to reading more of Kendi's work. This book discusses the horrors of racism over the centuries, so be aware of content warnings for discussion of racism, slurs, lynching, rape, murder, war, mass incarceration, and drugs.

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readandfindout's review

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informative reflective slow-paced

4.75

2017 first read: 4.5 stars.

A tabbed this book up so much. Everyone needs to read this, as it examines how every side of our history here in the United States helped racist ideas to develop into what they are today. This is a must read.

2022 reread:

Style/writing: 4.5 stars
Themes: 5 stars
Perspective: 5 stars

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