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

Some People insist that we’re residing in a post-racial society. However racist thought is not only alive and properly in America — it’s extra subtle and extra insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist concepts have an extended and lingering historical past, one during which almost each nice American thinker is complicit.

On this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the complete story of anti-black racist concepts and their staggering energy over the course of American historical past. He makes use of the life tales of 5 main American intellectuals to drive this historical past: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary activist Angela Davis.

As Kendi exhibits, racist concepts didn’t come up from ignorance or hatred. They had been created to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched racist insurance policies and the nation’s racial inequities.

In shedding mild on this historical past, Stamped from the Starting provides us the instruments we have to expose racist pondering. Within the course of, he provides us cause to hope.