Stamped from the Beginning

This book offers a comprehensive exposition of the progression of both racist and antiracist ideas and policies in the United States. It offers insight into the reality of racist ideas—in both segregationist and assimilationist forms—being produced to justify racist policies.

This is to be read BY EVERYONE. Well explained, easy to understand, and literally from beginning to end a very detailed and accurate presentation of racism and it's background.

MUST READ!!!!!!! I don't care who you are lol

I've been listening to bits and pieces of this book for a long time. It's a great resource and definitely a must read for anyone wanting to know more about the history of racism and slavery till the civil rights movements and present day issues, from a different perspective.

It might have felt a little repetitive for me because I had already read and loved the YA remixed version of this book, but it's still a spectacular and eye opening read. Highly recommend. Hoping to dive into The 1619 project as soon as I get my library copy.

And do checkout my review for Stamped if you want to read in more detail what I felt about this book.

You think you know about racism and then you read this book...so many aha moments.

A wealth of information that sent us down plenty of rabbit holes filling in gaps of historical knowledge. Some sentences left me rereading them 4-5 times to fully understand some pieces..perhaps room for improving clarity on those, but sometimes politics is just plain confusing like that. Overall I'm extremely glad I've read this book to fix my whitewashed, oversimplified, gappy education. It was fascinating learning the origins of racist ideas and he really challenges the idea of putting people in boxes, with showing the evolution of certain characters and their ways of thinking changing, sometimes good, sometimes bad.

Wow. This book was incredibly powerful and informative about the American History of Racism. 

When reading through some of the history, it was like I was reading about the Black Lives Matters movements, and the 2020 Protests. 

I was appalled and horrified to learn gynecological studies started on female slaves, and worse - they were not granted anesthesia. 

There are so many ways this book proves that while history does not repeat itself, history does rhyme. While the history of American Racism is rage-inducing, saddening, and fraught, I found myself hopeful for real change by the end of the book.

Note: This book ends with Obama's administration, but since then, we have seen underrepresented representation for women and POC in America's Federal Government. I remain hopeful we are unable to fully go back to an all white, all male Federal Government, and I remain hopeful we will be able to turn back racist policies from the past. I do not think the latter will happen in my lifetime, but I am hopeful it will happen. 

This is incredibly informative and should definitely be read for self-education and awareness. Although I'm British I still wanted to read this as the underlying racist ideas and issues are not US specific and should be understood by everyone regardless of where they live. This is quite long and dense so I would recommend the audiobook, as I personally find non-fiction easier to absorb on audio so may help others.

This is so detailed that I will definitely be reading it again. For this review, let me share a couple things I learned.
Racism and slavery go all the way back to Aristotle. At the time there was a guy, I don't remember his name, who was writing against Aristotle. Yet we don't remember that guy's name. We chose Roman and Greek thinking as the epitome of society, but we still ignored the anti-slavery guy.
WEB DuBois and Malcolm X learned and grew in anti- racist thinking and advocacy throughout their lives. So don't judge them for one thing they said, but the entirety of their life message.
I will be reading this again because there is no way to learn it all the first time.

SO much good information in here and it was definitely an important read. for me, I think there was almost too much info where I had a lot of trouble processing things because it was just so much all at once.

A definitive history indeed. This book is DENSE; while reading I kept thinking every American needs to read this, but most people would never pick up a book of this size. While definitely a history book, thorough and academic, it wasn't unapproachable. What Yuval Noah Harari did in Sapiens to illustrate the expanse of humanity, Kendi has done with the history of racism in America. The subtitle is not an exaggeration. This isn't something one can read while distracted - it's an investment, but it's worth it.

I kept thinking he needed a shorter summary version of this book, so I was happy to see there's a newer book (Stamped) with another author that sounds like it's meant for an audience with a shorter attention span. I'll try to read that version at some point, but I'm preemptively adding it to my Every Human reading list.

Summary: An extensive walk through the history of racism in America.

Stamped From the Beginning is another one of those books that I have waited too long to write about. I finished it nearly a month ago and almost immediately started How to be an Antiracist. They are such different styles of books that they are hard to compare. But they complement one another well. Stamped from the Beginning is more academic, much longer, and a history book. How to be An Antiracist is shorter, more personal, with Kendi using his personal development as a lens to understand racism and antiracism. The fact that he had already written Stamped from the Beginning I think gave more credibility and meaning to the more personal How to Be an Antiracist.

Stamped from the Beginning is one of those books I purchased years ago on several recommendations. I read enough about it to know the rough focus, and then I did not start reading. It was finally a very negative review that I assumed was largely a misreading of the book, that propelled me to start reading.

Stamped from the Beginning, despite its length and subtitle, as the Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, uses five people as a framing technique. Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, WEB DuBois, and Angela Davis are the voices that give focus to different eras of racism.

There are a couple of veins of though on the development of the social construct of racial identity construction in the academy. Some identify racism and White supremacy as a development of colonial expansion starting in the 14th to 16th centuries. And some suggested that racism and White supremacy expanded during that era, but are older (Willie James Jennings is in this group and roots racism in antisemitism that was developed out of Christian supersessionism.). Kendi appears to mostly be in the first group.

Cotton Mather and his ancestors were the upper crust of the early English settlers of North America. Mather and his family were religious elites that gave voice to the theological self-identification of Puritan New England as a special place for God to identify another special group of people. That perceived calling and the accidents of history, in Mather's view, were proof of God's particular blessing.

That ideological movement did not stop with just religious justification for racism and racial hierarchies, but those hierarchies mattered to the development of science. Science attempts to give explanations to data. But those explanations are limited to the conceptual frameworks that are culturally present. If racism exists, then examples of differences must be considered as biological or cultural if there is not a theoretical framework to think of sociological influence.

Throughout How to Be an Antiracist Kendi is working around three models of racial interaction. Segregationists do not want any integration. There are the assimilationists that accept some understanding of racist ideas, but want integration, although they are willing for it to be slow and hierarchical. And then there are the antiracists which oppose all racist ideas, both segregationist and assimilationist. That rough framework is present in Stamped from the Beginning but far less explicitly. With Thomas Jefferson and later William Lloyd Garrison, slavery and racial hierarchies exist within ideological concepts of freedom from oppression. Garrison and Jefferson would disagree on much, but both would have found ‘uplift suasion' as the only real model of integration if they had to support integration.

It was not until WEB DuBois that there is an antiracist voice, and even DuBois alternated at times to an uplift suasion model. Angela Davis was a radical that honestly before this book, I knew almost nothing about her, other than a connection to the Black Power movement. After I finished Stamped From the Beginning, I picked up a recent audiobook of her speeches or essays that gave more context to that final section of a relatively recent racist history.

There are things to quibble with here. One review took significant umbrage to the early discussion in the Cotton Mather section about White and Black being theological descriptions about sin and forgiveness. I do understand the critique, but I think the reviewer that thought the reading was wrong, did not understand how the implications of that theological framing have continued to recent years. White skin is not white as a sheep are white. Black skin is not black as coal is black. So I think Kendi is right that the theological implications of Black being the descriptor for sin and rejection of God and White being the descriptor of redemption, holiness and perfection does matter to the later theological understanding of racial history. The word Black was used to describe people of dark skin primarily of African descent. And White was used to describe light-skinned people, primarily of Northern European descent. Other words could have been chosen that did not have the theological connotations, but they were not.

I wanted to push back against Kendi for giving some people, like WEB DuBois space for changing opinions in ways that he did not allow for others, like Lincoln. That does not minimize that there was racism for people like Lincoln, but Lincoln's opinions over time did change. Lincoln did not ever become a modern anti-racist. However, his opinions from the Lincoln/Douglas debates until the end of his life did change, and they changed significantly.

This is a book that I think will cause many to push back. That is often good. It is what we do with the push back that matters. I do think that reading the two books, Stamped From the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist as complimentary is helpful.

Impressive in its scope, approach, and depth. This book read a tad drier than I had thought it would based on its popularity but it's a well-researched and well-written history of racist ideas – exactly what it purports. Worth the acclaim it has garnered.

Segregation and Anti-Rascism are relatively straightforward, but what Kendi does for the majority of this book is demonstrate how a third narrative in racism, Assimilation, has been interwoven into the fabric of the discourse. It's his handling of calls for assimilation and how they've historically been used to deepen racist agendas that is profound.

This is perhaps the most powerful and well-built book I've come across on the subject of xenophobia/racism. Not only is Ibram X. Kendi well versed on the subject, but he presents it in a very unbiased and honest manner. Tracing the history back to the first enslavement of Africans by the Portuguese in the 1400s, Kendi works through nearly 600 years with significant care and detail. He separates the historical figures from the legends and analyzes each by the same criteria: segregationist, assimilationist, and anti-racist. He doesn't shy away from pointing out the flaws of those who've been branded heroes, and the positives of the villains. Neither does Kendi fall into the trap of making his theory about race itself. As he illustrates repeatedly, figures from all racial groups and social classes have fallen into each of the three categories. And so, with the facts presented as they are here, the argument should be ended, once and for all. (But we know that will not happen so easily.)

Over and again, I was impressed with the author's very insightful, very thorough, and very rational presentation of the history. I agree strongly with nearly every point he made. Despite what we've been taught, so many of the decisions shaping our every day lives have been decided by racism. I like that Kendi strongly argues a point I've weakly made many times, ie the truest antiracists are not the champions of Civil Rights we celebrate today; the champions were more often assimilationists (sometimes even segregationist, as was the case with Lincoln). Their assimilationists views are the reason these figures are allowed to be celebrated in a society that still reeks of racism.

The one and only point of contention I had with Kendi's overall argument was his notion that people were in no way damaged because of the history of slavery and racism. If Kendi's whole point was that racism does not create a biological inferiority in blacks, by all means, that's without argument. But Kendi argues that to suggest an ailing psychology is racist. Living in fear is traumatic. I myself have suffered many injustices and been the brunt of much racist anger, the majority of which happened nearly twenty years ago, and I still have nightmares. I'm damaged, yet I had the freedom to hide when push came to shove. Others are not so fortunate. It's not merely about “inferior opportunities and bank accounts,” as Kendi suggests; it's also about the terror induced by a flash of red and blue lights in the rear-view mirror. It seems almost ludicrous to suggest there isn't some psychological consequence to centuries of abuse. And yet Kendi argues that very suggestion is wrong and racist. What is the harm in acknowledging the trauma of being treated inferior? Acknowledging that one has been a victim does not mean one is owning a state of inferiority. Any person of any social class or ethnicity or gender who has to struggle and struggle and struggle to get ahead while living in fear is going to be psychologically run-down, not merely “psychologically different” as Kendi suggests.

Stamped from the Beginning is a book I highly recommend for anyone who considers themselves to be an advocate for social justice. Too often, we applaud ideas that are inherently racist without recognizing them as such. Kendi examines all these ideas that have shaped us and gives a new perspective to view them with. And perhaps, having so thoroughly explored the subject, Kendi is right. Perhaps I'm wrong about the psychological impact of racism. No matter, because the discussion is alive and no one can say the history of racist ideas in America has not been thoroughly mapped. This is it. And it should not be ignored.

I finally finished it! Honestly this should be required reading for everyone. It's a hard read - and yes that's because I have the white privilege to be ignorant of history - but so worth it. So many racist ideas and policies have been the same since our country was founded and its hard to have hope. But maybe? I don't know. Read it.