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4.5 

Stamped from the Beginning

By Ibram X. Kendi
Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

 The National Book Award winning history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society.

Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America -- it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit.

In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. He uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to drive this history: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary activist Angela Davis.

As Kendi shows, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. They were created to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial inequities.

In shedding light on this history, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose racist thinking. In the process, he gives us reason to hope.

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1723 Reviews

4.5
“There are plenty of more thoughtful, insightful, and critical evidence based assessments and reviews of Stamped From the Beginning. This book has been out long enough to receive many responses more qualified than mine. My only recommendation would be that you read this with an open mind and consider the possibility that anyone’s perspective may be very different from yours, and that is a good thing if you are willing to learn from it.”

About Ibram X. Kendi

Ibram Kendi is a National Book Award-winning author of sixteen books for adults and children including the New York Times bestseller, How to Be an Anti-Racist. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, and the director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News racial justice contributor. He lives in Boston, MA. 

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