Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America opens Goodreads in a new tab

My thoughts

5/5stars Continuing to stick to my tbr for my Black History Month reads, here is another one of the must reads. The insight and understanding shared here of the history of racism: globally and in the US def makes up for the huge size of this book. The principal function of racist ideas in American history has been the suppression of resistance to racial discrimination and its resulting racial disparities. The beneficiaries of slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration have produced racist ideas of Black people being best suited for or deserving of the confines of slavery, segregation, or the jail cell. Consumers of these racist ideas have been led to believe there is something wrong with Black people, and not the policies that have enslaved, oppressed, and confined so many Black people. In this book [a:Ibram X. Kendi|14161726|Ibram X. Kendi|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1607960083p2/14161726.jpg] traces the evolution of America’s history of racist ideas, from the pre-revolutionary settlers and the sermons of Cotton Mather right through Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. DuBois, and Angela Davis. There are so many things which are wrong with how black people were (and still are) treated in the US but what's the bizarre is the fact that how every time a racist idea was born, there was always a scientific theory to "undeniably prove" that point. Time and again, racist ideas have not been cooked up from the boiling pot of ignorance and hate. Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era’s racial disparities away from those policies and onto Black people. It's also important to talk about the fact that anyone who decides to disagree/stay silent to racist ideologies is also complacent and thus being a racist. This is very rightly explained and discussed in this book. It's not enough to be not explicitly racist, we need to voice out against all sorts of racist ideas, to not only discredit them but also spread the word. the only thing wrong with Black people is that we think something is wrong with Black people. More and more people need to read this, Reread this. And grasp the vast knowledge this book has in store in each and every sentence, every quote of this book. That is what it truly means to think as an antiracist: to think there is nothing wrong with Black people, to think that racial groups are equal. There are lazy and unwise and harmful individuals of African ancestry. There are lazy and unwise and harmful individuals of European ancestry. There are industrious and wise and harmless individuals of European ancestry. There are industrious and wise and harmless individuals of African ancestry. But no racial group has ever had a monopoly on any type of human trait or gene—not now, not ever.