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

Abstract

Ibram X. Kendi's sprawling, epic treatment of racist ideas in America is at once too ambitious and not sufficiently ambitious. Framed according to a novel design by which five historical figures—Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis—steward readers across the arc of time, the book is breathtaking in its capaciousness. Setting out from Puritan settlements in North America in 1635 (from Aristotelian notions of human hierarchy, actually), approximately 511 pages later the author delivers us to our own moment in Barack Obama's decidedly not “postracial” America, hitting all the expected station stops along the way—colonial charters, the “Sons of Ham” mythology, Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829), the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the 1951–1953 radio and television sitcom Amos ‘n’ Andy, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), Richard M. Nixon's “southern strategy,” the 1991 beating of Rodney King, and Obama's 2008 Jeremiah Wright speech. Few of these topics get more than a paragraph, however. Breathtaking though the book may be in scope, its pace is necessarily breathless, leaving little room for interpretation, analysis, or contemplation. I blush to suggest that Kendi should have done more—this is a monumental piece of research and writing. But all that breadth does cost something.