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

by Ibram X. Kendi

The conclusions of the Kerner Commission shocked the United States like the rebellions it investigated. The commission members unabashedly blamed racism for the urban rebellions. It said, “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” The racist mainstream media had failed America, the report concluded: “The press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and white perspective.” In the afterglow of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act—as the United States proclaimed racial progress—the Kerner Commission proclaimed the progression of racism in its most famous passage: “Our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”