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

11 reviews

crybabybea's review against another edition

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challenging informative slow-paced

3.75

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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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brookey8888's review

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challenging dark emotional informative slow-paced

3.5

This was a lot. Was it a very important read and worth it yes. Did I sometimes feel dumb reading this yes. Most of the topics discussed are horrible so trigger warning. This book made me mad and sad. I do think people should read this, but it is basically a history book so I don’t know how assessable this would be for everyone. I do understand why it went through the whole history of slavery, but I don’t know as much about that so it was harder to I guess understand, but when we got more in the current day I was able to understand and like connect the dots more.

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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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mezzano's review

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challenging informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

Ever since I read Ibram X. Kendi's book How to be an Antiracist, I've been meaning to read Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. While I am no means an expert in racial politics or antiracism, I was stunned by how much I didn't know even after making the conscious effort to be more aware of how race affects my everyday life. I really appreciated how Kendi focused this story over 5 key historical figures, and used that as a tether to the political climate of each figure's respective period in American History. It was also really eye opening to see how race affected the very standards we learn in school, such as Shakespeare and the Salem Witch trials, even though race was never a part of any academic conversation at the very white schools I attended.

The humble nature of Kendi's work, where the author himself recognizes that everyone has an incomplete understanding of history and can improve on themselves to become more anti-racist, is very refreshing. It reminds readers that this is important, consistent, and constant work. Antiracism doesn't end with saying people are equal, just as it doesn't end with education (or reading a book). Even so, I was really pleased with how comprehensive this historical analysis really was. After reading, I felt like I walked away with a missing volume of history. As we continue to become more inclusive and accepting as a nation, I hope that this book replaces others in educational curricula. This is a book everyone should be exposed to at least once.

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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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