Stamped from the Beginning

By: Ibram X. Kendi

Published by PublicAffairs, 2023

<b>The National Book Award-winning history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society.</b><br> <br> <br> <br> 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.<br> <br> <br> <br> 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.<br> <br> <br> <br> As Kendi shows, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. They were created to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched racist policies and the nation's racial inequities.<br> <br> <br> <br> In shedding light on this history, <i>Stamped from the Beginning</i> offers us the tools we need to expose racist thinking. In the process, he gives us reason to hope.