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

Ibram X. Kendi

Dec 2023 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Avery Kidd Waddell

About this audiobook

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.

About the author

Ibram X. 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 the author of many books, including the National Book Award winner Stamped from the Beginning and the #1 New York Times bestseller How to Be an Antiracist.