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

by Ibram X. Kendi

“Negro leaders” thought that “white Americans did not know of or realize the continuing plight of the Negro,” he wrote in a 1935 essay. “Accordingly, for the last two decades, we have striven by book and periodical, by speech and appeal, by various dramatic methods of agitation, to put the essential facts before the American people. Today there can be no doubt that Americans know the facts; and yet they remain for the most part indifferent and unmoved.”11 In the eight decades since Du Bois wrote his essay, antiracist Americans have continued to strive by similar methods to put the essential facts before the American people. There can be no doubt that the producers and defenders and ignorers of racist policies know the facts. And yet they remain for the most part indifferent and unmoved: indifferent to the need to pass sweeping legislation completely overhauling the enslaving justice system; unmoved in pushing for initiatives like fighting crime with more and better jobs; indifferent to calls to decriminalize drugs and find alternatives to prisons; unmoved in empowering local residents to hire and fire the officers policing their communities. They remain for the most part unwilling to pass grander legislation that re-envisions American race relations by fundamentally assuming that discrimination is behind the racial disparities (and not what’s wrong with Black folk), and by creating an agency that aggressively investigates the disparities and punishes conscious and unconsci...