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

Ibrahim Kendi’s comprehensive history of racial thought in the US, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, was published in 2016. Organized around the lifespans of five of the most influential or representative individuals in racial thought across American history, the text spans centuries, offering an overview of the enduring and evolving forms of racist ideology in America.

Kendi’s book incorporates conversations in science, literature, visual and musical arts, politics, and media. A few of these conversations reach across the work to connect movements: discussions between segregationists, assimilationists, and antiracists; vacillations between polygenesis and monogenesis approaches to understanding race; and tropes of black masculinity and femininity all carry through myriad political movements and developments.

A deep awareness of political events, court cases, and Congressional debates shapes Kendi’s text. Rather than claiming racial progress or racial regress at any point in time, Kendi’s approach works to address the multiple motions of different groups throughout history. For example, Kendi works to nuance the interrelation of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism across American history in order to withhold explicit praise of one ideal figure.

Key phrases, such as “uplift suasion” and the “black exhibit” carry through Kendi’s text. These phrases help to contextualize and connect events across historical periods. Similarly, the prominent voices and characters of the text connect to one another (or diverge) ideologically; Kendi tracks these convergences and divergences.

The ultimate purpose of this text, Kendi writes, is not to change minds but to galvanize and empower fellow antiracists to understand their history and speak informatively about it. Central to Kendi’s argument is the mistake he sees in American racial discourse of calling racist policies the product of racist ideas; the paradigm, he sees, is the opposite. He tracks this assertion through American history, applying it to the lives of Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis. This thought is intended to empower antiracists to enter and occupy positions of power in order to enact antiracist policies that can then usher in antiracist thought to the mainstream.