Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is a leading author, historian, and speaker on Black history, discriminatory policy, racism, and antiracism. His 2016 historical study, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and provides the basis for Stamped, its young adult “remix.” His other works include The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972, How to Be an Antiracist, and Antiracist Baby, an illustrated children’s book. He was a 2019 Fellow through the Guggenheim Foundation. He also writes for the Atlantic and numerous other prestigious academic journals and media outlets.

Kendi founded and served as the executive director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. In 2020, he became the first director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, a relocated version of the entity at American University.

The Puritan minister Cotton Mather is at the center of the analysis in the first section of the book. He helped define intellectualism and theology in the Colonial New England and helped advance a racist American education system. Influenced by British ideas and eager to solidify a personally favorable class and power system in New England, Mather spoke about natural Black inferiority but insisted that Black souls could be saved through conversion to Christianity. He believed their souls would, as a result, whiten. The infamous Salem Witch Trials in 1692, in which Mather played a critical role, further helped solidify imagery of evil Blackness and good whiteness in the way colonists explicitly equated the Devil with a Black man or form.

The debates and conversations in which Mather took part exemplified the main societal concerns of the era—like the acute focus on religion—and also signaled issues that would remain critical long after Puritan influence died out in the colonies, like the logistics and righteousness of African conversion. Mather helped present the growing institution of slavery in such a way that it could be deemed acceptable by the Church, a powerful force in colonial and British society. Mather’s efforts in this regard exemplified the first era of circulating racist ideas to defend racist policy and institutions taking shape in the lands that would become the United States.

Jefferson anchors the second section of the book. Though Americans celebrate Jefferson for authoring revolutionary documents like the Declaration of Independence and for his role as a Founding Father of the United States, Kendi and Reynolds remind the reader of Jefferson’s many contradictions and duplicitousness when it came to race. He was antislavery but held slaves. He had moral quandaries about the institution but benefitted from an economy rooted in it. These thoughts and actions, though in so many ways inconsistent, exemplified the state of racist ideas circulating among intellectuals at the time.

A major difference in Jefferson’s time—the “Age of Enlightenment”—versus Mather’s was that debates were largely secular. Moral questions pertained to bodies as well as souls. Jefferson’s close relationship with enslaved Black people on his plantation, including Sally Hemings, with whom he had children, alongside more abstract debates about human origins and hierarchies, created conundrums that he never fully addressed before the end of his life. The book recreates the scene of his death, as Jefferson died “in the comfort of slavery” and “surrounded by a comfort those slaves never felt” (78). Fearing the disruptive economic and social impacts of emancipation and integration, Jefferson preferred colonization, the act of sending freed Black people to Africa—a continent on which many of them had never set foot—or to Louisiana, which Jefferson purchased from France during his presidency but remained free from mass white American occupation and settlement in the early 19th century.

By the end of his life, Jefferson espoused segregationist and assimilationist racist ideas and delved into antiracist research and thought. While he was instrumental in creating an American rhetoric of freedom and equality and establishing increasing freedoms for wealthy white men, his political career assisted the expansion of slavery into new grounds in terms of breeding enslaved people and acquiring new territories on the American continent.

The white editor and orator William Lloyd Garrison encapsulates many of the developments in racist, antiracist, and abolitionist ideology in the mid-19th century, before and after the American Civil War. Garrison was a wealthy and privileged man who founded the Liberator newspaper which devoted itself to an antislavery platform. He also helped create and bolster the American Anti-Slavery Society which distributed literature on abolitionism. Garrison openly critiqued Abraham Lincoln’s racist policy proposals and remained a highly visible and controversial figure throughout his career.

Garrison’s work highlights the possible disconnect between antislavery ideology and fully antiracist ideology. While he petitioned for emancipation —at first, he thought this should be gradual but then favored immediate freedom—he balked at the idea of immediate social equality, which he thought would be too incendiary and radical for disgruntled and potentially violent white people to accept or acknowledge. This plan of action placed the responsibility to quell white people’s fears on Black people, who would need to behave in certain “safe” and performative ways to prove their basic, nonthreatening humanity.

When the end of the Civil War brought the end of American slavery, Garrison recognized a decisive victory and retired. His health declined as anti-Black terror swept the South and established new modes of racial discrimination. He eventually voiced support for immediate equality, but he died without making the major types of contributions to the movement that he had as a younger abolitionist.

In the same way the book dissects the contradictions and racism of Thomas Jefferson, it interrogates the history of “Honest Abe” Lincoln, whom Americans have long credited as the “Great Emancipator” and harbinger of Black freedom. The book explains Lincoln’s increasingly inclusive ideas and platforms within the context of his strategic political career. For example, as he ran for president, he appealed to poor white Americans by decrying the free labor of slavery as a threat to their own livelihood before he considered the needs of Black people. Lincoln’s antislavery views still won him a lot of Black support, but as the Garrison example highlighted, antislavery views were not necessarily antiracist—only a step in the direction of eventual racial equality. Lincoln’s stances against Black social equality and voting allowed him to avoid alienating too many white supporters and to win the election. Before the Civil War, he agreed to leave southern slavery intact. Forced into war and emerging victorious, he finally circulated ideas about extending the right to vote to a sector of the Black community. This plan never came to fruition, as he was quickly assassinated.

The book also reveals how a celebrated focus on Lincoln as the main figure in emancipation erases the very real and important actions and efforts of Black historical figures, particularly enslaved men and women who emancipated themselves by escaping plantations and aiding the Union Army as it advanced through the South. Union troops could not have developed the immediate sense of horror and urgency in slavery or won the war without this critical assistance.

W. E. B. Du Bois is another celebrated figure in American and African American history, but his intellectual development started from a place of assimilationist aspirations. As a talented, educated, light-skinned young person with a diverse racial background, Du Bois embraced the ideals of uplift suasion, a strategy that aimed to win over white Americans and eradicate racism through exemplary behaviors and accomplishments of the Black community. This strategy has never worked in overturning racist policies or bringing about drastic antiracist policy.

His early work stood in contrast to that of Booker T. Washington, who was even less radical about pursuing Black equality. Whereas Du Bois championed the image of the respectable, educated Black professional, Washington emphasized blue-collar work that would be less controversial in a racist society. Through this debate, Du Bois articulated the importance of a sector of the Black community he called the Talented Tenth, people like himself that embodied Black intellectual prowess and could uplift their Black brothers and sisters while honoring the mainstream goals of influential white Americans. Though this framework initially garnered support and influence, Du Bois turned away from it in his later life when he became a practicing antiracist.

Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880 challenged white narratives of Black political bullying after the Civil War and blamed racist, elitist white people for destroying momentum that could have ushered in real civil rights instead of expanding white privilege. Observing the disproportionate impact of the Great Depression on Black people, he vociferously argued for better education, socialist policies, and Black-controlled safe spaces for community development outside the realm and purview of white people and uplift suasion. He continued antiracist activism until the end of his life.

The book discusses the intellectual development and legacy of the iconic civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. He emerged as a young and charismatic leader with fantastic oration skills and Christian appeal as a reverend and community organizer. Preaching and practicing nonviolence, King still faced jailtime and widespread hate and distrust from racists.

Many of the events orchestrated by King, including the Birmingham March and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom became iconic and catalyzing events in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. King had personal conversations and high-profile meetings with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. These opportunities were denied to more radical figures like Malcom X.

Gradually, King shifted away from a concerted fight against segregation and assimilationism, favoring efforts to bring economic stability to Black and poor people. This emphasis was in line with community empowerment strategies articulated in the Black Power movement and through organizations like the Black Panthers, though King himself still operated and organized from Christian groups. A racist gunman killed King on April 4, 1968, after a speech calling for a revolution in human rights. Like many events in his life, King’s death was a catalyzing moment that unleashed increased activism and antiracism.

Another famous civil rights figure, Malcolm X, emerges in the history as a more radical alternative to Martin Luther King—a familiar framework in histories of the Civil Rights Movement. In the terms employed in the book, King delivered assimilationist ideology at a time when Malcolm X delivered a strain of antiracism. Malcolm X concerned himself with issues directly pertaining to Black people, including the ways Black people and communities could prepare for self-defense and establish self-sufficiency.

As King tried to work with the political establishment on legislation, Malcolm X remained critical and distrusting of the country. Fearing his influence and potential, his enemies assassinated him in early 1965.

The book stresses the legacy Malcolm X left behind. He was a huge source of empowerment and mobilization in urban Black communities. Antiracists celebrated him and popularized his autobiography, which became “antiracist scripture” (177), according to Reynolds. As Black Power gained momentum, Black communities and activists kept Malcom X’s ideas alive. Because these achievements threatened the status quo of a racist society, the mainstream media vilified him.

Angela Davis is the anchor in the final section of the book and the only Black woman to occupy such a space in the narrative. She is also the most celebrated by the authors of any of the central figures, many of whom were not antiracist and did not leave behind empowering legacies for Black Americans.

The authors introduce Davis as a college student watching and critically engaging with racism and antiracism around her. Her strengths as an activist quickly become apparent as she establishes a Black Student Union at her graduate school and earns advanced degrees in philosophy from international universities. As Davis moved further left on the political spectrum and took up professorships in the US, Republican politicians sought to vilify and persecute her as a public threat. After fleeing officials and spending a few years incarcerated, Davis successfully defended herself in an absurd murder trial and returned to teaching, though not without facing continued efforts to remove her.

Her work as a prolific Black feminist greatly expanded and bolstered far-left approaches to antiracism. She was a longtime member of the Communist Party and ran for vice president twice on the Party’s ticket. She left the Communist Party for its refusal to acknowledge or amend sexism and elitism among its ranks. She participated in international summits on racism and discrimination and remains a pioneering and productive figure in American antiracism. The authors hope that readers will follow her lead in addressing all dimensions of bigotry and combating them with conviction.