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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 Audible Audiobook – Unabridged
Ibram X. Kendi (Author), Christopher Dontrell Piper (Narrator), Novel Audio (Publisher)
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The National Book Award winning history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society.
Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America--it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit.
In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. He uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to drive this history: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary activist Angela Davis.
As Kendi shows, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. They were created to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial inequities.
In shedding light on this history, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose racist thinking. In the process, he gives us reason to hope.
Praise for Stamped from the Beginning:
"We often describe a wonderful book as 'mind-blowing' or 'life-changing' but I've found this rarely to actually be the case. I found both descriptions accurate for Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning... I will never look at racial discrimination again after reading this marvellous, ambitious, and clear-sighted book." - George Saunders, Financial Times, Best Books of 2017
"Ambitious, well-researched and worth the time of anyone who wants to understand racism." - Seattle Times
"A deep (and often disturbing) chronicling of how anti-black thinking has entrenched itself in the fabric of American society." - The Atlantic
- Winner of the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction
- A New York Times Bestseller
- A Washington Post Bestseller
- Finalist for the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
- Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Boston Globe, - Washington Post, Chicago Review of Books, The Root, Buzzfeed, Bustle, and Entropy
Editorial Reviews
Review
"An engrossing and relentless intellectual history of prejudice in America.... The greatest service Kendi [provides] is the ruthless prosecution of American ideas about race for their tensions, contradiction and unintended consequences."―Washington Post
"We often describe a wonderful book as 'mind-blowing' or 'life-changing' but I've found this rarely to actually be the case. I found both descriptions accurate for Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning... I will never look at racial discrimination again after reading this marvellous, ambitious, and clear-sighted book."
―George Saunders, Financial Times, Best Books of 2017
"A deep (and often disturbing) chronicling of how anti-black thinking has entrenched itself in the fabric of American society."―The Atlantic
"A staggering intellectual history of racism in America that is both rigorous and ...readable."―New Republic
"An intricate look at the history of race in the U.S., arguing that many well-meaning American progressives inadvertently operate on belief systems tinged with a racist heritage."―TIME
"Ambitious, well-researched and worth the time of anyone who wants to understand racism."
―Seattle Times
"Kendi upends many commonly held beliefs about how racism works, exploring the ideas and thinkers behind our most intractable social and cultural problem."―Boston Globe
"An altogether remarkable thesis on history, but, in ways that are both moving and immediately painful, it also reverberates with the post-election autopsy we're all conducting right now... Stamped from the Beginning is a riveting (and often rivetingly written) work, well deserving of the National Book Award."―The Stranger
"The National Book Awards show the way toward the America we want, not the one we're getting."―New York Magazine
"Kendi has done something that's damn near impossible: write a book about racism that breaks new ground, while being written in a way that's accessible to the nonacademic. If you've ever been interested in how racist ideas spread throughout the United States, this is the book to read."―The Root
About the Author
Ibram X. Kendi is a New York Times best-selling author and award-winning historian. He is Professor of History and International Relations and the Founding Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. A frequent public speaker, Kendi specializes in the history of racism and antiracism. He is the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Nation, 2016), which won the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction. He is also the author of the award-winning book, The Black Campus Movement (Palgrave, 2012). Kendi's writings have appeared in Black Perspectives, Salon, The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Daily News, Time, The Huffington Post, and The Root. Kendi has received research fellowships, grants, and visiting appointments from a variety of universities, foundations, professional associations, and libraries, including the American Historical Association, Library of Congress, National Academy of Education, Spencer Foundation, Lyndon B. Johnson Library & Museum, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, Brown University, Princeton University, Duke University, University of Chicago, and UCLA. Before entering academia, he worked as a journalist. Kendi earned his undergraduate degrees from Florida A&M University, and his graduate degrees from Temple University. Kendi lives in Washington, DC.
Product details
Paperback: 608 pages
Publisher: Bold Type Books; Reprint edition (August 15, 2017)
Customer reviews
4.8 out of 5 stars
4.8 out of 5
2,171 customer ratings
Top Reviews
Top Reviews
MrsG
5.0 out of 5 stars An Important Book, Because Knowledge Is Power
Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2017
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I bought this book for a class that I'm taking in the fall, and I started reading it this weekend. I just completed part one, and while reading it I had to put this book down and weep multiple times. They say we don't see the world as it is… we see it as we are. We wake up every morning and open our eyes to a world that has been created for us. We breathe in ideas, thoughts, philosophies, opinions that created the world we live in. We believe what we have been told to believe. We think what we've been told to think. And until we trace the roots of our human history and the ideas they created it, we will never understand the world we live in or the world inside our own minds. Thank you, Ibram X. Kendi, for helping me to begin to trace some of the roots of the philosophies that rule our lives today. It is only in knowledge and understanding that we can undo the damage that's been done. I am undone… This book is incredible, brutal, devastating, truthful… necessary. Read it… weep . . . and then change yourself and your world.
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Anthony Pignataro
5.0 out of 5 stars White people should read this
Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 2018
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This is one of the greatest history books I've ever read. I was highlighting passages on pretty much every page, mostly because so much of what's here was new to me. Hey, I'm an upper middle class white guy who's trying to examine my own privileges, understand more of why there's so much racism in this country and learn how I can do better. This book, which was undoubtedly extremely difficult to write, is an amazing resource, one I'll be referring back to probably for the rest of my life. We all owe Ibram X. Kendi a tremendous debt.
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Dojcin
1.0 out of 5 stars To a Hammer everything looks like a nail.
Reviewed in the United States on March 18, 2020
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Kendi pathologically cherry-picks his data. When discussing race and health, he laments that blacks are more likely than whites to HAVE Alzheimer’s disease, openly implying that this demonstrates clear anti- Black racism in the medical field. Of course, he neglects to mention that Whites are more likely to DIE from Alzheimer, according to the Center for Disease Control.
In the same vein, Kendi notes that blacks are more likely than whites to die of prostate cancer and breast cancer, but he does not include the fact that blacks are less likely than whites to die of esophageal cancer, lung cancer, skin cancer, ovarian cancer, bladder cancer, brain cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and leukemia.
By selectively citing data that show blacks suffering more than whites, Kendi turns what should be a unifying, race-neutral battle ground––namely, humanity’s fight against deadly diseases––into another proxy battle in the War on Racism.
The entire book is filled with this kind of imaginary stuff. Unfortunately, It would require 5 whole books to debunk all the errors in this publication. - This book was nothing but a rushed political propaganda published in an election year (2016). Unfortunately it did not work and it will work even less in 2020 as Trump has unprecedented black support for a republican candidate.
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Brent Young
1.0 out of 5 stars Biased and half truths. It was a good test of my knowledge.
Reviewed in the United States on August 12, 2019
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It is so simple to just claim racism for every disparity. If you look for racism everywhere, you will find racism everywhere. The author even has to re-define racism so as to support his theories. And most of the points he makes are very one sided and only half the story. Just one example, the crack cocaine penalties being more severe was pushed by the Congressional Black Caucus. Charles Rangle stood behind the president has he signed that bill. It was Clinton who refuse to change the standard after it was deemed racist. All of these facts are left out. The author just wants to blame the Republican president for being a racist.
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A. H. Wagner
5.0 out of 5 stars A very painful but highly illuminating must-read on how racism took root and persists in the US
Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2017
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About halfway through reading this book, I realized I was highlighting almost every single page and had to start color-coding my highlights so as to make a little more sense of why certain passages struck me—a visual testimony of how illuminating Stamped from the Beginning is. With a primary focus on racism toward African-Americans and people identified as Black, this book is a thoroughly researched, sweepingly comprehensive survey of racism from its first traceable roots in ancient Greece when Aristotle said Africans had “burnt faces” to the start of the African slave trade in 15th century Europe, to the first recorded slave ship arriving in colonial America in 1619, all the way through the Civil War, the Jim Crow laws, the 1960s Civil Rights movement, and up to the present day. In order to help readers navigate this extensive timeline, author Ibram X. Kendi divides the book into five parts, featuring one historical figure as a sort of tour guide or anchor for each part.
Very few individuals or institutions mentioned in this book come off as completely free of racist thinking; even many abolitionists and civil rights activists are revealed to have held racist ideas that contradicted their cause. This made me realize the extent to which racism has ensnared the United States in its pernicious roots. In Stamped from the Beginning, Kendi presents two main ideas about racism that helped me understand its influence and progress over the centuries. First, he explains that “Hate and ignorance have not driven the history of racist ideas in America. Racist policies have driven the history of racist ideas in America.” The author admits, “I was taught the popular folktale of racism: that ignorant and hateful people had produced racist ideas, and that these racist people had instituted racist policies. But when I learned the motives behind the production of many of America’s most influentially racist ideas, it became quite obvious that this folktale, though sensible, was not based on a firm footing of historical evidence.” As Kendi explains further, “Racially discriminatory policies have usually sprung from economic, political, and cultural self-interests, self-interests that are constantly changing.” Now that I understand self-interest—not hate or ignorance—has been the driving factor behind racist policies, I can better understand why racism hasn’t died out with the Emancipation Proclamation or desegregation or any of the Civil Rights Acts passed in this country. Tragically, racism persists and continues to evolve according to the current self-interests of people and institutions in power. It’s why, after slavery was abolished, segregation and the Jim Crow laws rushed in to replace it, and long after segregation has been outlawed, African-Americans continue to be oppressed by disproportionate mass incarceration as well as disadvantaged by fewer, inferior housing and employment opportunities.
Second, Kendi points out that racism is not simply a debate between those who support racist ideas and those who oppose racist ideas. Throughout history, three–not two–viewpoints on racism have persisted: “A group we can call segregationists has blamed Black people themselves for the racial disparities. A group we can call antiracists has pointed to racial discrimination. A group we can call assimilationists has tried to argue for both, saying that Black people and racial discrimination were to blame for racial disparities.” As much as I would like to believe I am firmly in the antiracist camp, reading this book made me realize I have held a lot of racist ideas from an assimilationist viewpoint that I need to correct. Kendi gives many examples of well-meaning civil rights activists, including some African-Americans, who upheld assimilationist ideas. Some persisted with these ideas their entire lives, others realized their error and later self-corrected to an antiracist viewpoint, and still others upheld both antiracist and assimilationist ideas, often not realizing the contradiction. Thus, a tragic pattern that has repeated itself throughout American history is the persistence of many assimilationists in seeking to abolish racist policies and ideas with the same flawed strategies that never work.
Indeed, the African-American author admits, “Even though I am an African studies historian and have been tutored all my life in egalitarian spaces, I held racist notions of Black inferiority before researching and writing this book.” I think it’s crucially important that Kendi tells readers about his mistaken notions of race—not to make readers feel better about their own ignorance, but to demonstrate how deeply racist ideas have taken root in American culture. Hopefully this admission on the author’s part will ease readers out of their defensive mode and open their minds to the disturbing truth that racism is a lot more pervasive among us Americans than we would like to believe.
If you want to understand exactly how racism took root in the United States and why it has persisted through the present day, if you are prepared for a very sobering, very painful, and often highly disturbing look at the many flaws, hypocrisies, and atrocities in the American notions of democracy, exceptionalism, and “liberty and justice for all,” then Stamped from the Beginning is a must-read. Ultimately, what the author conveys with copious examples is that “Black Americans’ history of oppression has made Black opportunities—not Black people—inferior.” An absolutely necessary emendation to the traditionally accepted canon of American history.
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