STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING – Ibram X. Kendi

If you want a comprehensive history of how racism evolved in the United States, this is your ticket.  Ibram Kendi’s book consists of in-depth scholarship and reflects the work of a well-regarded theorist. Kendi focuses on five Americans that exemplify five different conceptions of race over the centuries: activist Angela Davis, scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, abolitionist and journalist William Lloyd Garrison, minister Cotton Mather, and Thomas Jefferson.

At first glance, this will seem like a hefty, intimidating read.  It’s got the weight and content of a beefy reference text, and because of that you might not be tempted to read it from cover to cover. I think it’s valid to use it to look up sections that interest or concern you as they come up in your studies or research.  But I’d suggest that Ibram Kendi is a fantastic writer and storyteller as well as historian. The way he frames history through the lives of his focused-on individuals helps make this way more readable.  It has the intimacy of biography and the honesty of a confessional work. This, even as it lays out critical elements of theory and is chock-full of historical information both fascinating and brutal.  I’ve no doubt why it caught fire the way it did. It not only accomplishes what it set out to do, but it’s also very difficult to put down once you start.

A central concept recurring through the book is that race is a construction.  White and black aren’t biological, inherent realities.  They have no firm anatomical or genetic basis.  They’re concepts human beings made up, not ones we came in with.  Racists created racist ideas to support racist policies and not the way around. This is backwards compared to what I remember reading in American textbooks.  In fact, I think this seems downright counterintuitive to a lot of white people.   Kendi goes all the way back to the first Portuguese slave-kidnapping expeditions in Africa to prove it.  In so doing, he reiterates racism specifically as any idea that a certain race is inferior or superior to another. He demonstrates that policies we’d call racist predated the justifications European cultures used to support the policies.  I didn’t know the tenets of critical race theory when I read this book. But once I’d Kendi’s book, the tenets of it pretty much felt like common sense.  They still do.