Book Review: Stamped From The Beginning
I read Ibram X. Kendi’s other book, How to be an Antiracist, last spring, and I then started reading Stamped From The Beginning for a book group I will be in this September. It must have been quite a lot of work for Kendi to write this book, which is a comprehensive evaluation of racist attitudes over 400 years of American history.
I think it’s the perfect book to be reading right now as the country goes through a racial reckoning. I highly recommend this book to those who want to know the origins of many of the racial problems in our country.
The author argues racism is as American as apple pie or “stamped from the beginning,” and explain why racial disparities continue to persist to this day. A great deal of the first part of the book focuses on pre-colonial and up until the end of the antebellum era, and the mental aerobics by white people to justify their racism. Specifically, there is a lot of discussion about the alleged physical and sexual differences between black and white people. In the book, Kendi talks about the “Jezebel” stereotypes of black women and the “BBC” stereotype of black men.
But the most common anti-Black racist stereotype is that all black people are dangerous, and this is why they had to be “tamed.” This is why there are so many killings of unarmed Black people on a regular basis.
This is why Trump likes to refer to black protesters like Colin Kaepernick as “thugs,” but police officers who kill Black people are “patriotic.”