An accomplished history of racist thought and practice in the United States from the Puritans to the present.

Anyone who thought that the 2008 election of President Barack Obama marked the emergence of post-racial America has been sorely disillusioned in the subsequent years with seemingly daily reminders of the schism wrought by racism and white supremacy. And yet anyone with even a cursory understanding of this country’s tortured history with race should have known better. In this tour de force, Kendi (African-American History/Univ. of Florida; The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972, 2012) explores the history of racist ideas—and their connection with racist practices—across American history. The author uses five main individuals as “tour guides” to investigate the development of racist ideas throughout the history of the U.S.: the preacher and intellectual Cotton Mather, Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, ardent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, and activist Angela Davis. Kendi also poses three broad schools of thought regarding racial matters throughout American history: segregationist, assimilationist, and anti-racist. Although this trio can be reductionist, it provides a solid framework for understanding the interplay between racist ideas, anti-racism, and the attempts to synthesize them—“assimilationism,” which the author ultimately identifies as simply another form of racism, even when advocated by African-Americans. The subtitle of the book promises a “definitive history,” but despite the book’s more than 500 pages of text, its structure and its viewing of racial ideas through the lens of five individuals means that it is almost necessarily episodic. Although it is a fine history, the narrative may best be read as an extended, sophisticated, and sometimes (justifiably) angry essay.

Racism is the enduring scar on the American consciousness. In this ambitious, magisterial book, Kendi reveals just how deep that scar cuts and why it endures, its barely subcutaneous pain still able to flare.

-Kirkus Review

This chunky, 500-page book has a lot to say about the history of racism in the US. Kendi talks about the disputes between early settlers over whether slaves were human at all, and how this shifted from looking to Noah’s story in the Bible for justification to “scientific” theories of racial hierarchy. He discusses ideas held by anti-slavery activists about whether African societies had always been primitive and if black people had something to learn from “Anglo-Saxon culture”. Kendi explains about how ideas of race interact with those of class and gender, using intersectional terminology.

The book comes right up to date, discussing current arguments over whether being “colourblind” is the same as being anti-racist — it isn’t — consider the All Lives Matter slogan. However, Stamped From the Beginning falls short of being a definitive history for a couple of reasons.

It starts from ideas and then links them to the struggle. He says that actions come before justifications, but that is not the way he writes. This makes the book weak on how ideas change through struggle. So it is least able to cope with the most dynamic periods, when ideas and actions change in rapid and complex ways, like the civil war. Kendi is fascinating on the Enlightenment arguments that were key to developing racism, but also argues — wrongly in my opinion — that racism predated this. The emphasis on ideas makes it hard to explain why President Barack Obama, who understood all the subtle nuances of race, did so little for poor black people while in office.

Kendi divides ideas on race into three categories: racist, assimilationist and anti-racist. Assimilationist ideas are those that say that while black people aren’t inherently inferior, the way to end racism is for black people to accommodate with white society. But many anti-racist activists have held ideas that could be described as assimilationist or even racist.

So he criticises the great anti-slavery and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth for taking a somewhat confused position on whether black men should get the vote before white women, saying, “After wielding racist ideas against coloured women, the 80 year old legend turned her racist ideas onto coloured men.” But describing her argument like this hardly clarifies our understanding of the issues or the dispute.

The book tries to fit the entire history of racist ideas into five sections, based around the lives of five people. These are racist puritan witch-hunter Cotton Mather, US president Thomas Jefferson (the slave owner who drafted the declaration of independence), anti-slavery newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison, historian and activist WEB Du Bois and Black Power communist Angela Davis.

Each is important, but using them to sum up the period each lived in is constricting. For instance, Du Bois was politically active until his death in 1963, aged 95. His anti-racism moved from elitist gradualism, through Marxism to a sort of black nationalism. It is hard to cover all these subtleties, while making him representative of a period. Stamped From the Beginning is full of fascinating facts, but for a history of ideas could do with being clearer.

Ken Olende
Socialist Review 426 (July 2017)
https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/stamped-beginning/

A fine book, engagingly written, took a huge amount of research. The title is a little misleading: although racism against native Americans is touched on, the book deals mostly with racism against black folks. I thought the treatment of the period ending with Reconstruction was stronger than the rest of the book, but I enjoyed all of it nonetheless. Was shocked to learn that civil war-era abolitionists did not want to end slavery to allow freed slaves to join society, but rather so that they could be deported to Liberia or the Dominican Republic. Hardly anyone, including Lincoln, thought that blacks could successfully become equal citizens. Was also surprised to learn about the disparaging comments FDR made about blacks as a college student, and how fervently LBJ pursued the Equal Rights Amendment.

I read this book shortly after reading Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee. Together they are very much challenging me to re-think how I feel about my country's history. ( )

Excellent book. It takes time to read. It is packed with information that has not been widely shared in our education system. We all, in the US, harbor many racist ideas because racism is everywhere in our culture. There is no escaping it. But one can become aware and strive to overcome one's racism. ( )

I pressed pause on this book on page 256. It's a great book, but I find myself needing a pause on the nonfiction for the moment. Call it pandemic reading syndrome. Hope to get back to it soon. ( )