Stamped From the Beginning

“Kendi blends deep research and analysis with a powerfully intimate and personal voice. . .Kendi grounds his argument in the present moment, citing the killing of Trayvon Martin and the birth of Black Lives Matter as ‘heartbreaks that are a product of America’s history of racist ideas’ — a history he then narrates through the lives and works of five individuals: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. DuBois and Angela Davis. By anchoring the book on these five historical figures — each of them brilliant, complicated and fascinating — Kendi renders this work of intellectual history as compelling as the juiciest biography.”

“I honestly wish every American would read this book, especially people who haven’t been exposed to the history of blatant, transparent racism in our public policy.”

“Given our political moment and the work we need to do as individuals and as a country, this book should be on every young leader’s bookshelf. It’s not pretty, but the truth often isn’t.”

“Kendi upends many commonly held beliefs about how racism works, exploring the ideas and thinkers behind our most intractable social and cultural problem.”

“One thing is sure. Stamped from the Beginning will be read by future generations. It has the potential to become a classic, must-read chronicle in the vast historiography on antiblack racist thought in the United States.”

“To structure his book, which he spent three years writing, Kendi built it around five major American intellectual figures: Puritan leader Cotton Mather, founding father Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois and activist Angela Davis. While showing the reader each of them grappling with questions of race, Kendi places them in the wider context of history with graceful, engaging prose and deeply researched details. Stamped is a book that connects everything from Mather’s 17th century theological theories about the souls of Africans to Bo Derek’s cornrows in the movie 10, and much more.”

“Self-proclaimed as a definitive history of racist ideas in the US, this exhaustive, encyclopedic opus lives up to that claim. Kendi’s mighty tome is breathtaking in its scope. . . .Both, worthwhile and extraordinary. . . . Essential.”

“In his ambitious, illuminating, and engaging book, Ibram X. Kendi seamlessly assembles sources from Cotton Mather to Angela Davis; the Great Awakening to Black Lives Matter; the Birth of a Nation to Hip Hop culture, to show how not only race but racist ideas are at the center of American thought.”

“Richly sourced and engaging, Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning is a highly accessible yet provocative study that seeks to complicate our understanding of racist ideas and the forces that produce them.”

“Kendi has done something that’s damn near impossible: write a book about racism that breaks new ground, while being written in a way that’s accessible to the nonacademic. If you’ve ever been interested in how racist ideas spread throughout the United States, this is the book to read.”

“An intricate look at the history of race in the U.S., arguing that many well-meaning American progressives inadvertently operate on belief systems tinged with a racist heritage.”

“An engrossing and relentless intellectual history of prejudice in America.... The greatest service Kendi [provides] is the ruthless prosecution of American ideas about race for their tensions, contradiction and unintended consequences.”

“Kendi admits that he is not writing to change the minds of those who produce and espouse racist ideas. Rather, in his honesty about how deeply he himself had held multiple racist ideas before embarking on the historical odyssey of this book, he gives the reader permission to accompany him on that eye-opening journey...Kendi leaves plenty of room for self-questioning, and for drawing connections between the racist apologetics of the past and those of the present. The process makes for a compelling, thoroughly enlightening, unsettling, and necessary read.”

“Stamped From The Beginning centers on five figures: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis. Through their lives, and with novelistic flair, Kendi details the American construction of white supremacy as a three-pronged tragedy of religion, government, and activism.”

“Stamped From The Beginning is ambitious, well-researched and worth the time of anyone who wants to understand racism.”

“Kendi’s provocative egalitarian argument combines prodigious reading and research with keen insights into the manipulative power of racist ideologies that suppress the recognition of diversity. This is a must for serious readers of American history, politics, or social thought.”

“Stamped from the Beginning is a tour de force of intellectual history that brilliantly illuminates the tragic history of racist ideas from slavery to Black Lives Matter.”

“Both a penetrating treatise and a wonderfully accessible work of intellectual history, Stamped from the Beginning reveals the heritage of ideas behind the modern dialectic of race-denial and race-obsession. By historicizing our entrenched logic of racial difference, Kendi shows why “I don’t see color” and other professions of post-racialism remain inexorable alibis for white supremacy. As this meticulous study suggests, we escape such contradictions only by becoming staunch anti-racists and actively confronting the intellectual and material legacies of our common racialist genealogy. Stamped from the Beginning has done the cause of anti-racism a great service.”