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

Ibrahim Kendi’s comprehensive history of racial thought in the US, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, was published in 2016 and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Kendi has also collaborated author Jason Reynolds (Long Way Down, Ain't Burned All the Bright) on a young adult "remix" of Stamped from the Beginning titled Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You, and is well known for his 2019 book, How to Be Antiracist, a #1 New York Times best seller.

Stamped from the Beginning is organized around the lifespans of five of the most influential or representative individuals in racial thought across American history. The text spans centuries, offering an overview of the enduring and evolving forms of racist ideology in America, and incorporates conversations in science, literature, visual and musical arts, politics, and media. These conversations connect movements: discussions between segregationists, assimilationists, and antiracists; vacillations between polygenesis and monogenesis approaches to understanding race; and tropes of black masculinity and femininity all follow through myriad political movements and developments.

The text is shaped by Kendi's deep awareness of political events, court cases, and Congressional debates. Rather than claiming racial progress or racial regress at any point in time, his approach works to address the multiple motions of different groups throughout history. For example, Kendi works to nuance the interrelation of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism across American history in order to withhold explicit praise of one ideal figure. Key phrases such as “uplift suasion” and the “black exhibit” are threaded throughout the text to help contextualize and connect events across historical periods. Similarly, the prominent voices and characters of the text connect or diverge ideologically, and Kendi tracks these convergences and divergences.

Kendi states that the ultimate purpose of the text is not to change minds but to galvanize and empower fellow antiracists to understand their history and speak informatively about it. Kendi’s argument is centered on a mistake he sees in American racial discourse: calling racist policies the product of racist ideas. He asserts that the paradigm is the opposite, and tracks this assertion through American history, applying it to the lives of Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis. Kendi's intent, with this book, is to empower antiracists to assume positions of power in order to enact antiracist policies that will usher antiracist thought into the mainstream.