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

Name: Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
Rating: 4.53 (38280 reviews)
Author: Ibram X. Kendi

Ibram X. Kendi March 8, 2016

4.53 38.3k Ratings

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Synopsis

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. Stamped from the Beginning uses the lives of five major American intellectuals to offer a window into the contentious debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and anti-racists. From Puritan minister Cotton Mather to Thomas Jefferson, from fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to brilliant scholar W. E. B. Du Bois to legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis, Kendi shows how and why some of our leading pro-slavery and pro–civil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America.

As Kendi illustrates, racist thinking did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Racist ideas were created and popularized in an effort to defend deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and to rationalize the nation’s racial inequities in everything from wealth to health. While racist ideas are easily produced and easily consumed, they can also be discredited. In shedding much-needed light on the murky history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning offers tools to expose them—and in the process, reason to hope.

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

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

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

Just Mercy

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

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