Review of <i> Stamped from the Beginning</i>. I welcome your comments!

[Helene]

How could this get less than five stars when, at the end, it moved me to tears. There were so many emotions in between: anger, dismay, shame, frustration, to name a few. I am left in awe of this young man and now want to read his newest book, How to be an Antiracist. He was only 34 when he wrote this. He’s not yet 40, may he have a long, prosperous, prolific, and antiracist life!

I didn’t want to give this five stars, it’s very long (511 pages) and very dense (so much information it could be a full course of study). I kept getting bogged down in all the historical information but did read on. I’m glad I did. I’d like to think I’ll read it again to get more out of it the second time, and that’s very hopeful, but it probably won’t happen. There is SO MUCH in this book, I know I only got part of it. The following passages are the ones I want to keep.

Starting in 1635, the book takes us through the centuries through five people: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Bu Bois, and Angela Davis. There are many other important political figures, Washington, our own Franklin Pierce, Lincoln (a racist!), Reagan and Nixon (known racists), Martin Luther King, Jr., both Bushes, Clinton, Obama, and many historical and literary icons like Phyllis Wheatley, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan B. Anthony, Baldwin, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, well you get the picture, the book IS over 500 pages.

Kendi talks about the barriers to overcome racism and how even well meaning abolitionists give in to assimilation, and upward suasion. Until we see individuals and not race, we will remain racist. Frederick Douglass, as Kendi states on page 199, “summed up the history of racist ideas in a single sentence. “When men oppress their fellow-men, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression.””

The term “stamped from the beginning” goes back to February 2, 1860, and Jefferson Davis, senator from Mississippi. He objected to a bill that appropriated funds to educate Blacks in D.C. “This Government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes” but “by white men for white men. The bill was based on the false assertion of racial equality, he stated. The “inequality of the white and black races” was “stamped from the beginning.” (pages 208-209)

“Caste” also comes up (I love Wilkerson’s Caste.) on page 197 in quoting a Georgia “lady” who wrote a review in 1853 of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “Mrs. Stowe says that the ... chief wrong in the catalogue of sins against the negro, is the prejudice of caste, the antipathy of race, the feeling we crush into their souls that they are ‘nothing but niggers.’” But Mrs. Stowe was forgetting she said, “the fact that their Maker created them ‘nothing but niggers.’”

Reconstruction plays big, as you would expect. I was struck by what William Lloyd Garrison said in his last speech given in Boston on the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. “The shift in public opinion away from Reconstruction was the consequence of emancipating Black people as a military necessity rather than as an “act of general repentance.” Garrison recognized racist ideas as the core of the problem. “We must give up the spirit of complexional caste or give up Christianity.” (page 256) (40 acres and a mule? It still hasn’t been redressed.)

Kendi quotes Booker T. Washington on page 288 as Washington talks about “White Saviors.” “Washington expressed faith in God, took personal responsibility, worked mightily hard, overcame incredible hardships, and saw racial progress and “White saviors” at every turn. “White Savior” stories were fast becoming a fixture in American memoirs, novels, and theatrical productions. They were enjoyed by Americans of all races as hopeful signs of racial progress.” I couldn’t help but think of the “Good Germans” like Schindler, during WWII.

The “southern strategy” comes up as Kendi talks about Nixon who avoided admitting that he was racist by ‘demeaning Blacks and praising Whites without ever saying Black people or White people. It remained over the next five decades the national Republican strategy as the GOP tried to unite northern and southern anti-Black racists, war hawks, and fiscal and social conservatives.” (page 410)

Kendi sums up on page 503: “When will the day arrive when Black lives will Americans? It depends largely on what antiracists do – and the strategies they use to stamp out racist ideas. The history of racist ideas tells us what strategies antiracists should stop using … the ongoing failure of the three oldest and most popular strategies Americans have used to root out these ideas: self-sacrifice, uplift suasion, and educational persuasion.”

And again on page 508: “Lawmakers have the power today to stamp out racial discrimination, to create racial “equality as a fact,” to quote LBJ, if they want to. … But local and federal lawmakers fear the repercussions from campaign donors and voters. … If racism is eliminated, many White people in the tip economic and political brackets fear that it would eliminate one of the most effective tools they have at their disposal to conquer and control and exploit not only non-Whites, but also both low-income and middle-income White people.”

I think as one reviewer has said, that this country will always be racist and that we are all racist, if not all the time, then some if not most of the time. We must continue to work at being antiracist. Now, after the Trump-era, more than ever.