Product Description
Stamped from the Beginning
Author(s): Ibram X. Kendi
Format: Paperback
The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
**Now a Major Netflix Film**
Stamped from the Beginning is a redefining history of anti-Black racist ideas that dramatically changes our understanding of the causes and extent of racist thinking itself.
Its deeply researched and fast-moving narrative chronicles the journey of racist ideas from fifteenth-century Europe to present-day America through the lives of five major intellectuals - Puritan minister Cotton Mather, President Thomas Jefferson, fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, brilliant scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis - showing how these ideas were developed, disseminated and eventually enshrined in American society.
Contrary to popular conception, it reveals that racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Instead, they were devised and honed by some of the most brilliant minds of each era, including anti-slavery and pro-civil rights advocates, who used their gifts and intelligence wittingly or otherwise to rationalize and justify existing racial disparities in everything from wealth to health.
Seen in this piercing new light, racist ideas are shown to be the result, not the cause, of inequalities that stretch back over centuries, brought about ultimately through economic, political, and cultural self-interest.
In forcing us to reconsider our most basic assumptions about racism and also about ourselves, Stamped from the Beginning leads us to a true understanding on which to build a real foundation for change.
**Included in Barack Obama's Black History Month Reading List**
About the Author
Ibram X. Kendi is one of the world's leading antiracist scholars. He is Professor of History and the inaugural director of the Howard University Institute for Advanced Studies. His many books include Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and How To Be an Antiracist, which was a number one New York Times bestseller and a Sunday Times bestseller. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Genius Grant, and in 2020 Time named Kendi one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
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