Book Review: Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

Image: The book cover has a tan background with a black silhouette of a person's head from the neck up facing to the right. Across the profile are 5 streaks of red painted lines and woven on top of and under the lines is "Stamped from the Beginning" in white uppercase letters. Underneath the neck of the profile is "The Definitive history of Racist Ideas in America" in smaller, italic, black letters. The lower right corner has Ibram X. Kendi's name in red letters.

Note: I normally only post advance or recent release reviews to this blog and reviews of older books to goodreads. This book came out over a year ago, but I decided it was recent and important enough to include here.

This is a long book, but it is not the kind that I spent time wishing was shorter. In fact, this book could have been much longer and held my interest in satisfying ways. Stamped from the Beginning is mostly a history of anti-Black racist ideas in (North) America. It also serves as one of the best accounts of the History of the United States I have ever read. Ibram X. Kendi covers a huge amount of important history that often goes untold or is mangled by white supremacist revisionists. I wonder what life would be like if this was the history book we had in grade school.

This book outs the "founding fathers" as slavers and racists, covers the complex intricacies of Black resistance, liberation, and assimilation, and also strives to hold space for Black women and LGBTQ Black people that is often lacking in historical accounts such as this. I do think that Kendi could have done slightly better on that last part. There were one or two times where he seemed to draw a false equivalency between Black women calling out Black men's patriarchy and Black men hating on Black women. However, most of the time- especially in the sections on Angela Davis and the epilogue- he does well to highlight the often buried history of Black womens resistance against not just white supremacy but also against patriarchy and misogyny within Black liberation movements.

Kendi avoids the racist-or-not-racist dichotomy and instead puts people into one of three camps: segregationists, assimilationists, and anti-racists. Technically, the first two are different kinds of racists, but weaving these three groups' ideologies throughout the book really helped to navigate the massive nuances in the history of racist ideas and liberation movements. He also uses terms like "gender racism" to describe the unique ways Black women deal with oppression- known to some others as misogynoir and/or intersectionality- and "upliftsuasion" in reference to assimilationist ideas and respectability politics.

Kendi calls attention to how anti-Black racism was used by wealthy whites in order to keep poor whites, non-Black people of color, white women, and other oppressed groups in their places. The painful history of indigenous enslaved people being replaced by Black enslaved people, native and poor white people offered privileges to pull them away from enslaved Black people, gynecological and other health experiments on enslaved people, IQ testing turning subjective intelligence into a faux-objective measurement targeting Black and poor people, and so on are highlighted with great detail. In the end, Kendi asserts that dismantling racism will serve the vast majority of white people more than racism does as racism has always been used as a tool to oppress everyone. Anti-Black racism has a root in and connection to every form of oppression and centering and dismantling anti-Black racism in all struggles will always help everyone in the big picture- even white people.

I highly recommend this as a history book about the USA, not just about racist ideas. It is by far the most comprehensive and accurate history of my country of residence that I have read.