Reviews with content warning for Sexual violence - 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

8 reviews

meant2breading's review

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense slow-paced

4.0

I mostly read fiction, so I won’t be rating this like I do other books. Stamped From the Beginning should be a required educational reading. It is a lot of information! To help me absorb and process it all better, I read about 20-30 pages a day. Very thankful to have had the opportunity to read and better learn this history. I will definitely plan to reread this again one day.

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crybabybea's review against another edition

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challenging informative slow-paced

3.75

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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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megmu18's review

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challenging dark informative slow-paced

4.5

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bgirl1214's review against another edition

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challenging informative reflective slow-paced

4.5

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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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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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