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

by Ibram X. Kendi

for a Black man named Warren McCleskey unless a “racially discriminatory purpose” could be demonstrated. If the Court had chosen to rule in McCleskey’s favor, it would have opened the future to antiracist cases and to renovations of the criminal justice system, which was rotting in racism. But instead the justices disconnected racial disparities from racism, deemed racial disparities a normal part of the criminal justice system, and blamed these disparities on Black criminals, yet again producing racist ideas to defend racist policies. McCleskey v. Kemp turned out to be—as New York University lawyer Anthony G. Amsterdam predicted—“the Dred Scott decision of our time.” The Supreme Court had made constitutional the rampant racial profiling that pumped up the inhumane growth of the Black executed and enslaved