Front cover image for Stamped from the beginning : the definitive history of racist ideas in America

Stamped from the beginning : the definitive history of racist ideas in America

Ibram X. Kendi (Author)
Americans like to insist that we are living in a postracial, color-blind society. In fact, racist thought is alive and well; it has simply become more sophisticated and more insidious. And as historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas in this country have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. 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 antiracists. 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 proslavery and pro-civil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America. As Kendi provocatively 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--From publisher's website
Print Book, English, 2017
First trade paperback edition View all formats and editions
Bold Type Books, New York, NY, 2017
Biographies
xi, 583 pages ; 24 cm
9781568585987, 9781568584638, 1568585985, 1568584636
1204100075
Preface to the paperback edition
Prologue 1
Part I. Cotton Mather
Human hierarchy
Origins of racist ideas
Coming to America
Saving souls, not bodies
Black hunts
Great awakening
Part II. Thomas Jefferson
Enlightenment
Black exhibits
Created equal
Uplift suasion
Big bottoms
Colonization
Part III. William Lloyd Garrison
Gradual equality
Imbruted or civilized
Soul
The impending crisis
History's emancipator
Ready for freedom?
Reconstructing slavery
Reconstructing blame
Part IV. W.E.B. Du Bois
Renewing the south
Southern horrors
Black Judases
Great white hopes
The birth of a nation
Media suasion
Old deal
Freedom brand
Massive resistance
Part V. Angela Davis
The act of civil rights
Black power
Law and order
Reagan's drugs
New Democrats
New Republicans
99.9 percent the same
The extraordinary Negro
Epilogue
"First trade paperback edition: August 2017"--Title page verso
With a new preface for this edition (pages ix-xi)
Includes Reading Group Guide
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