PDF Summary:Stamped from the Beginning, by Ibram X. Kendi

More than 50 years after the Civil Rights Movement and more than 14 years after electing its first Black president, why is the United States still divided along racial lines? That’s the central question of Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, which argues that contrary to common wisdom, racism doesn’t begin with prejudice and hatred—it begins with self-serving policies whose proponents justify their actions by inventing racist ideas. Kendi, an African American Studies scholar, develops this claim by analyzing the history of racist ideas in the United States and offering readers a better understanding of how to combat contemporary racism.

In this guide, we’ll explore such insights as how enslavers convinced themselves that slavery benefited slaves and why most antiracist reformers harbored racist thoughts. Along the way, we’ll make connections between this book and Kendi’s later writings, and we’ll expand upon, and sometimes challenge, Kendi’s ideas by referring to other prominent writers on race such as Robin DiAngelo and Jennifer Eberhardt.

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Likewise, many of the colonies had started moving toward abolition by the Revolutionary period. In fact, many Northern states did indeed abolish slavery during or immediately after the war—though their economies remained tied to slave-based Southern agriculture. This conflict of interests led to a number of protections for slavery in the Constitution—most notoriously, the definition of a Black slave as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of Congressional representation.

In short, Revolutionary-era attitudes about slavery are perhaps more nuanced than Kendi lets on. And yet, in framing the Constitution, the founders demonstrated Kendi’s fundamental claim on a grand scale: By prioritizing the new union and its economic success over their moral objections to slavery, the founders accepted a racist policy as a way to achieve what they saw as the interests of the new nation.

The Science of Race

During the Colonial era, pro-slavery forces found support in new scientific attitudes about race. Kendi explains that from around 1730 to 1760, Enlightenment scientists like taxonomist Carl Linnaeus established pseudoscientific racial hierarchies that placed Europeans at the top (attributing to them qualities like intelligence, ingenuity, and lawfulness) and Africans at the bottom (citing traits like laziness, neglectfulness, and capriciousness). These hierarchies inspired similar hierarchies within the slave trade, as enslavers ranked slaves according to their national and ethnic origins, which were thought to determine a slave’s utility for various kinds of work.

Kendi points out that these kinds of hierarchies served two social purposes. First, they justified slavery by perpetuating the idea that Black people were inferior and benefited from slavery’s civilizing influence. Second, they helped prevent slave uprisings by widening the rift between poor White people and poor and enslaved Black people while also introducing racist divides within enslaved populations by ranking some slaves as “better” than others.

(Shortform note: Racial hierarchies may serve an additional purpose—imposing order on society. In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari argues that social hierarchies exist because they offer guidelines for interacting with people you don’t know personally. In other words, Harari argues that hierarchies—especially when they’re based on visual cues like skin color—help us determine who to interact with and how. Similarly, in Caste, Isabel Wilkerson argues that American racism is best understood as a caste system, meaning that it serves as the basis of social order by dividing people into groups and prescribing appropriate behaviors and lifestyles for each group.)

“Uplift Suasion” and the “Extraordinary Negro”

In the face of ongoing slavery and racism, some Black people and White reformers began to publicly argue for the abolition of slavery. While abolitionist arguments in America date back to the late 1600s, opposition to slavery gathered momentum through the 18th century, culminating in the gradual passage (from 1780-1804) of antislavery laws in Northern states. Kendi says that one of the main approaches in this early abolitionist movement was to demonstrate that Black people were (or could be) equal to their White counterparts. Kendi calls this approach uplift suasion—the idea that if Black people prove their intellectual, moral, or other capabilities, White people will realize that their racist ideas are wrong.

Unfortunately, Kendi says, this tactic was doomed from the beginning. For one thing, as we’ve seen, slavery existed not because enslavers believed in racist ideas, but because they benefited from slavery. Therefore, even if you discredited the ideas, the benefit remained and so would the institution.

You Can’t Persuade Away Racism

The logic of uplift suasion is similar to another kind of persuasion-based antiracism strategy called “education suasion.” In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi explains that education suasion assumes that White people are racist because they don’t know any better. By this theory, you can eliminate racism by teaching White people not to be racist—for example, by pointing to examples of high-achieving Black people, or by explaining how racist policies harm people.

According to Kendi, the problem with both uplift suasion and education suasion is that nothing can persuade away racist ideas. First, as we’ve seen, Kendi believes that racism doesn’t come from ignorance, but from racist policies. As a result, educating the average White person (who has no say over those policies) won’t accomplish anything. He also points out that racist policy makers are likely already aware of the effects of their policies, meaning that there’s nothing to educate them about.

Moreover, even if education had a chance of working, it can be difficult to get people to recognize and confront their own biases. As Robin DiAngelo argues in White Fragility, some White people react defensively to even the suggestion that they might be racist—a fact that makes it hard to even have conversations about race and racism.

Additionally, it was easy for racists to ignore evidence that contradicted their ideas. Kendi points out that when confronted with well-educated, articulate, and literate Black people, such as Cambridge-educated Francis Williams and published poet Phillis Wheatley, White racists dismissed them as “extraordinary negroes” who were exceptions to the general rule of Black inferiority.

(Shortform note: The “extraordinary negro” idea is still around today. For example, Kendi points out that in 2007, then-Senator Joe Biden described Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Meanwhile, other commentators at the time debated whether a “good Black” like Obama was “Black enough” to appeal to fellow Black voters—and more recently, similar debates have arisen about Vice President Kamala Harris. There are two problems with this line of thought. First, it implies that all Black people are a certain way, and second, it implies that successful Black people don’t fit a standard Black “mold” (that is, they are extraordinary exceptions).)

Moreover, Kendi says, the basic logic of uplift is inherently racist. By suggesting that Black people can prove their worth by achieving White standards of intelligence, learning, culture, and so on, uplift implies that White standards are the superior standards to which all races should aspire (in the process dismissing any culture other than that of post-Enlightenment Western Europe).

(Shortform note: In White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo argues that these default White standards even pervade our language. She points out that we frequently use terms like “African American,” “Asian American,” “Latino American,” and so on, but rarely say things like “White American” or “Caucasian American.” She argues that this is because as a society, we see Whiteness as the default form of American citizenship and identity.)

Plus, Kendi points out, uplift shifts the blame for racial disparities onto Black people. If some Black people can “better” themselves by adopting White ideals, the implication is that “lesser” Black people have only themselves to blame for their situations and for racism itself. If only Black people as a whole behaved better, the logic goes, people would view and treat them better.

(Shortform note: Another possible reason the uplift approach is ineffective is that people can struggle to differentiate between members of other races. In Biased, Jennifer Eberhardt argues that our brains’ preference for simplicity causes us to reduce groups other than our own to broad categories—a phenomenon she calls the “other-race effect.” The other-race effect explains why people sometimes proclaim that members of another racial group “all look alike”—and it may explain why White racists saw people like Williams and Wheatley as exceptions to the larger Black category rather than as evidence that disproved their racist preconceptions.)

The Civil War and the Emancipation Movement

By the 19th century, the abolition movement had gathered momentum that would ultimately culminate in the American Civil War (1861-1865). But as Kendi points out, anti-slavery thought wasn’t always antiracist thought—in fact, abolitionists frequently reproduced racist assimilationist ideas that cast Black people as having been reduced to helpless brutes by slavery. Kendi argues that this dichotomy is exemplified by William Lloyd Garrison, one of the country’s most vocal and influential abolitionists. Kendi also points out that during this period, there was an increasing interest in deporting Black people to Africa, as well as an increase in racial tensions among Black people and between Black and White people.

White Saviors

One of the counterintuitive insights of Kendi’s book is that it’s possible to oppose one form of racism while perpetuating another—as was the case with Garrison’s abolitionist movement, which was popular from the 1830s until slavery ended in 1865. Kendi argues that, like many of his time, Garrison believed that Black people needed White people to rescue them from slavery and uplift their minds and spirits. Though an advocate of immediate and total emancipation, Garrison argued that enslaved Black people should wait for White and free Black abolitionists to effect a political solution to slavery. (Yet, as Kendi notes, during the Civil War, thousands of Black people required no help to free themselves by running from their plantations, volunteering for the Union army, and so on.)

(Shortform note: Garrison’s view demonstrates what might today be called a White savior complex—a phenomenon that arises when White people attempt to help people from other racial groups in ways that reflect an attitude of superiority. While there’s nothing wrong with helping others, experts explain that the problem arises when White people assume that they have knowledge, skills, or resources that the affected group lacks and when they don’t take into account the wants and needs of the people they’re helping. Not only is White saviorism racist and insulting, it can make problems worse by convincing saviors they’ve solved a problem when they haven’t fixed the underlying inequities that caused the problem in the first place.)

Garrison wasn’t the only abolitionist to take a paternalistic stance toward the Black people he meant to help. Kendi points to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which had immense influence on the abolitionist movement. Kendi argues that the novel introduced the new racist stereotype of the extraordinarily spiritual Black person in Uncle Tom, a man weak of body but strong of soul. He explains that Uncle Tom played into preexisting stereotypes of weak Black men unfit to lead themselves—let alone a family, political movement, or nation. Portrayals like this reinforced the idea that Black people needed White people to come to their rescue.

(Shortform note: This spiritual-Black-people stereotype persists in the contemporary fiction trope of the “magical negro”—a stock character defined by his or her good sense, folk wisdom, and mystical powers (which may include healing, clairvoyance, or a special connection to God). Not only does the magical negro reinforce racist stereotypes, but it also marginalizes Black characters by reducing them to sidekicks, guides, or advisers to a White protagonist. Moreover, some scholars warn that when we depict Black people as possessing superhuman traits, we may raise the chances that police resort to violence when interacting with Black citizens.)

Imbruted By Slavery

Part of the justification for this paternalistic approach was the idea that slavery had turned Black people into the savages it claimed them to be. Kendi argues that this is classic assimilationist logic: Whereas enslavers argued that Black people were inherently inferior, many emancipationists argued that Black people had been made inferior by slavery’s abuses. Kendi points out that both of these stances are racist because both proclaim that Black people are inferior (they differ only in their assessment of who’s at fault for that inferiority). Yet, against Black protests to the contrary, many emancipationists clung to the idea that slavery had left Black people incapable of caring for themselves or joining in society.

How to Defend Racist Policies by Decrying Racism

One of the points Kendi makes throughout the book is that racist ideas are incredibly flexible—they can be stretched, twisted, and otherwise repurposed as needed to support essentially any racist policy. The idea that slavery made Black people inferior provides a particularly vivid example of this principle.

As noted, this idea was initially conceived as racist argument against a racist policy (slavery). But in recent years, the inherent racism of this abolitionist stance has been used to defend ongoing racial disparities by attacking those who call attention to them. For instance, some conservative politicians and commentators have attacked Critical Race Theory (CRT)—an academic movement that studies the relationships between race, racism, power, economics, politics, history, and more—for its supposed anti-Americanism and anti-White racism.

One common argument from this camp is that CRT teaches Black people to see themselves as helpless victims. The implication is that CRT itself is racist because it proposes that Black people are unequal—just as emancipationists suggested hundreds of years earlier. In a 2021 editorial, Kendi argues that this odd rhetorical inversion—which suggests that those fighting against racism are actually perpetuating it—is a political smokescreen designed to draw attention away from current policies that are actually causing racial inequity.

Recolonization

Kendi says that as abolitionists fought to end slavery, others debated what to do with Black people if they were freed. Since the Colonial era, there had been arguments that slavery was wrong, but that Black people could never live among White people (Kendi cites one such opinion from as early as 1700). As this notion proliferated over the years, it gradually inspired the idea of recolonization—the mass deportation of Black people to Africa. Kendi explains that this idea held both segregationist and assimilationist appeals, as it would keep Black people from tainting White society while also allowing those Black people who had been “uplifted” by White influence to improve the lots of the more “primitive” native Africans they encountered.

Although recolonization was an extreme idea, it had a lot of political traction. Kendi says that Jefferson endorsed it for much of his life, and in 1821, his friend and fifth US President James Monroe allowed the American Colonization Society to acquire land in Africa (in what’s now Liberia) to use as a colony for freed American slaves. Kendi notes that even Abraham Lincoln—now remembered as the “Great Emancipator”—preferred the idea of sending Black Americans to Liberia rather than setting them free in their own country.

(Shortform note: The idea that non-Whites should leave America is still alive and well. For example, in 2020, then-President Donald Trump tweeted that four Congress members of color—Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib—should “go back” to their own countries, prompting his supporters to chant “Send her back!” in reference to Omar (the only one of the four women to be born outside the United States). As commentators noted at the time, the logic behind these chants is similar to the logic behind recolonization—the idea in both cases is that non-Whites don’t share White America’s values and therefore shouldn’t be part of American society.)

As Kendi points out, recolonization is racist because it implies that Black people aren’t American—even though by the time of the Civil War, some Black families had been in the country for almost 250 years. Kendi also notes that Black opponents of recolonization in the 1810s protested against being sent to the “savage wilds of Africa”—an attitude that reflects the extent to which Black Americans had absorbed racist White perceptions of the continent.

(Shortform note: Recolonization also implies that all of Africa is the same when in fact, the continent is home to a wide range of geographical and cultural diversity. To suggest that all Black people would be “at home” in Liberia (or any specific place in Africa) is to elide that diversity and reduce all African peoples to a monolithic “other.”)

Reconstruction and Jim Crow

From the end of the Civil War in 1865 until 1877, the US underwent a period of Reconstruction in which Congress passed a set of constitutional amendments intended to guarantee civil rights to newly freed Black people, and government officials and Northern citizens alike attempted to protect and enforce these new rights in the South. Kendi notes that White racists responded to these efforts first with violence, then with new laws (known as Jim Crow laws) designed to reestablish segregation and discrimination while spreading false notions of Black criminality.

Amid these political and social struggles, Kendi says, uplift suasion found renewed voice in the person of W.E.B. Du Bois, a black scholar and activist who spent much of his life promoting both antiracist and assimilationist ideas before adopting an uncompromising antiracist stance in his later years.

Double Consciousness Perpetuates Uplift Suasion

According to Kendi, Du Bois’s most influential early work (The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903) reveals a tension between racist and antiracist thought. Kendi cites Du Bois’s concept of double-consciousness—the idea that Black Americans simultaneously see themselves through their own eyes and through the eyes of a racist White world. Kendi argues that this idea is both antiracist (because it validates Black peoples’ experiences and points of view) and assimilationist (because it reinforces the idea that Black people should always be on their best behavior in order to impress White onlookers).

This assimilationist tendency led Du Bois to promote the idea of the Talented Tenth—the highest-achieving 10% of the Black population. Du Bois argued that highly educated Black people should seek public office and business leadership so as to lead their less accomplished racial brethren to a better life. By stepping into the public spotlight, Kendi says, Du Bois believed that elite Black people would set an example for their own race and prove Black worth to White racists.

(Shortform note: Kendi’s treatment of double-consciousness fails to capture its rich philosophical and psychological depth. In fact, the idea of double-consciousness has inspired generations of scholarship on race and ethnicity. For example, in The Black Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy reinterprets double-consciousness to argue that there’s a unique Black culture that combines elements of African, American, Caribbean, and British cultures—a claim that has little to do with Kendi’s description of double-consciousness as a dichotomy between antiracism and assimilationism.)

The Birth of Jim Crow

At the same time that Du Bois was promoting Black education and achievement, racist laws emerged that found new ways to marginalize Black people. These laws began after the Compromise of 1877, when, in order to settle the contested 1876 Presidential election in their favor, Northern Republicans removed the federal troops who had been enforcing civil rights in the South. Between 1890 and 1910, Southern states passed laws called Jim Crow laws that allowed segregation and severely limited Black civil liberties. These laws stayed in effect until 1965.

Kendi points out that Jim Crow laws were possible because early antiracist laws only targeted racist policy language (rather than guarding against racist outcomes). This oversight allowed laws that were technically legal (because they avoided racist language) but that discriminated against Black people (for example, by requiring subjective civics tests before allowing people to vote). This tactic was strengthened by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), a Supreme Court ruling establishing that racial differences were real and that states could discriminate on racial grounds so long as they provided “equal” accommodations.

A Brief History of Anti-Black Voter Suppression

One of the most insidious and pervasive Jim Crow practices was the suppression of the Black vote that was supposed to be guaranteed by the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870. Whereas some Jim Crow policies (like legal segregation) have gone away, voter suppression remains a concern to this day.

As early as 1890, Mississippi built poll taxes and literacy tests into its constitution in an explicit move to “exclude the Negro” from politics by exploiting the lower educational and socioeconomic status of Black men as compared to their White counterparts. Soon, this “Mississippi Plan” proliferated throughout other (mostly Southern) states.

Another provision of Mississippi’s constitution stripped voting rights from convicted felons for the rest of their lives. Such a policy disproportionately targets Black people because, as discussed below, Black people are disproportionately convicted of crimes. Yet criminal disenfranchisement is still relatively widespread—as of 2021, 11 states restrict voting rights even for people who have completely finished their sentences.

Meanwhile, in 2021, Georgia passed voting laws that make it harder to vote early or by mail, methods that had become popular in majority-Black areas as an antidote to long lines and insufficient polling locations. Likewise, Georgia and other states have capitalized on spurious accusations of voter fraud to pass strict voter ID requirements that disproportionately block non-White citizens from voting.

The Myth of Black Criminality

Kendi says that part of the justification for this widespread discrimination was the notion that Black people were dangerous and needed to be controlled. He argues that the post-Civil War era spurred the disproportionate arrest and prosecution of Black people—whose widespread incarceration was then used as evidence of Black criminality. Kendi argues that even as White racists began regularly lynching Black people for even the slightest of perceived misdeeds, this mob violence became evidence of Black moral turpitude. For example, in an address to Congress, President Theodore Roosevelt declared that Black rapists were the number one cause of lynchings.

(Shortform note: According to legal scholar Michelle Alexander, after the Civil War, racist Whites used a combination of criminal codes and extrajudicial killings to reestablish the same social hierarchy and labor exploitation that had been in place under slavery. In The New Jim Crow, Alexander explains that many Southern states passed laws allowing them to arrest Black people for crimes like vagrancy and then lease these prisoners into low-paying or unpaid labor. Meanwhile, as Isabel Wilkerson points out in Caste, racist terrorist practices like lynching reinforced White supremacy while suppressing Black resistance to the social order.)

Civil Rights Through Today

By the mid-20th century, civil rights activists were finally making some headway toward political and social change. Yet Kendi argues that many social changes only succeeded because of White self-interest, and as a result, they had the side effect of reinforcing old racist ideas and inspiring new ones. For Kendi, this period is exemplified by Angela Davis, a Black academic and political activist whose work highlights feminist as well as racial concerns—and whose imprisonment in the 1970s illustrates both the racial biases of the prison system and the way racist leaders have sometimes used the criminal justice system to shut down their political opponents.

Civil Rights as Self-Interest

Kendi says that following World War II, the US wished to be seen as the leader of the “free world” and win influence in global politics and economic markets—including those that were emerging as various countries won their independence from their former European colonizers. In this context, Kendi argues, President Dwight Eisenhower realized that the US’s obvious racism and prejudice would hurt the country’s global image—especially as the rest of the world began to see the violent oppression and abuse of Black activists at the hands of White law enforcement officials in the South.

(Shortform note: In other words, just as self-interest can lead to racist policies that then lead to racist ideas, so too can self-interest lead to antiracist policies and ideas. For example, in Hidden Figures, Margot Lee Shetterly says that during World War II, government research groups began hiring women and Black people out of necessity because so many White men were serving overseas. Likewise, Shetterly argues that during the Space Race, it became obvious that segregation limited the US’s potential for scientific achievement. In both cases, leaders began to support Black and female equality—not because they initially held antiracist or antisexist ideas, but because national interest compelled them to change their policies.)

Kendi suggests that this political self-concern helped open the door for integration in the 1950s and new civil rights laws in the 1960s. But when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he says, they inadvertently created a new racist myth. Kendi argues that by proclaiming equality without addressing the historical and ongoing inequities that put Black people at a disadvantage, the act suggested that Black people were now on an equal playing field and that if they didn’t excel in equal measure to White people, their failure to do so proved their fundamental (racial) inadequacy.

(Shortform note: In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo argues that the playing field still isn’t level today. For instance, she points out that non-Whites face discrimination when applying to college, making them less likely than their White peers to earn college degrees. This in turn disproportionately limits job prospects for non-White people, who face further discrimination from employers if their names “sound Black” or “ethnic.” Oluo says that these disadvantages lead to a cascade of socioeconomic consequences for non-Whites, who face a racial wealth gap, housing discrimination, and more.)

The Evolution of Racist Rhetoric

Moreover, Kendi says, the legal successes of the Civil Rights movement inspired politicians to adopt newer, less blatant ways of signaling their racist intent. Kendi points to Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” as an early example of racist code language. Nixon capitalized on the racist myth of Black criminality in 1968 by campaigning on “law and order” and criticizing laws that had strengthened the “criminal” elements.

Kendi argues that Nixon knew many of his listeners would hear “criminals” as “Black people,” which allowed him to run a racist campaign without ever openly mentioning race. Kendi suggests that this tactic has continued ever since, with terms like “welfare queen” (popularized by Ronald Reagan in 1976) and “thug” (which began taking on racial overtones in the 2010s) allowing public officials to disparage Black people with pseudo-neutral language.

(Shortform note: Although the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy was in part based on racist signaling, according to political science professor Angie Maxwell, race wasn’t the Southern Strategy’s only talking point, nor was Nixon its only proponent. Maxwell argues that throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Republican Party strengthened its Southern support by aligning itself with traditional gender roles (which reinforced Southern conceptions of White womanhood). In the 1990s, Maxwell says, Republicans cemented their hold over the South by associating themselves with Evangelical Christianity.)

According to Kendi, racist leaders didn’t always limit themselves to encoding racist language in discussions of crime—they actually used the criminal justice system as a means of oppression. Kendi points to the 1970 imprisonment of Angela Davis—who had already twice been fired from her assistant professorship for her Communist Party ties and her political speeches—as an example of the unwarranted legal scrutiny he suggests was sometimes aimed at Black leaders. Likewise, Kendi points to Ronald Reagan’s “war on drugs” in the 1980s—a war that Kendi says disproportionately targeted Black people for arrest and imprisonment and perpetuated the idea that Black communities are inherently crime-ridden.

(Shortform note: In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that the war on drugs has made the myth of Black criminality into a self-fulfilling prophecy. She suggests that current drug laws disproportionately push Black men into the criminal justice system with discriminatory policing and inequitable trial and sentencing practices. To make matters worse, once they’re released from prison, ex-convicts face lifelong disadvantages in employment, housing, and social standing—all of which lead to higher chances of criminal recidivism. Meanwhile, Alexander points out that like slavery and Jim Crow before it, the contemporary prison system has a number of economic incentives to continue its racist practices.)

One result of these racist political strategies was a new strand of assimilationist logic that blamed racial disparities on supposedly “pathological” Black families, communities, and culture. Kendi traces this idea to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Assistant Secretary of Labor who in 1965 authored a report describing the Black family as a “tangle of pathology.” Kendi explains that the Moynihan Report suggested that Black men, emasculated first by slavery and then by discrimination, were too weak to lead their households or communities. Meanwhile, Kendi says, the report stereotyped Black women as promiscuous and irresponsible.

Combining these two ideas, the theory of pathological Black families suggested that Black people were incapable of healthy and functional family lives (which in turn explained the poverty and supposedly rampant crime in Black communities). Kendi points out that even as this theory ostensibly points to racism as the underlying cause of Black pathologies, it nonetheless claims that Black people are, in fact, defective.

And yet, Kendi says, like other assimilationist ideas before it, this theory was adopted by racist White people and Black people alike. He argues that throughout the 1980s and 1990s, some conservative politicians blamed Black people for a lack of “personal responsibility,” suggesting that if they just stopped behaving badly, their problems would go away. Meanwhile, Kendi says, many Black leaders began to fret about cultural trends like “Gangsta rap,” which they feared would hurt White opinions of Black people while setting dangerous examples for Black youths.

Why the Myth of Black Pathology Is So Damaging

These popular narratives about the flaws in Black families and communities produce a mix of damaging ideas that go beyond just reproducing the notion of Black inferiority. For example:

Blaming single-parent homes obscures many of the racist obstacles Black people face. For example, some commentators criticize the statistics that suggest that single-family homes are bad for kids, pointing out that these statistics take into account neither the discriminatory factors that produce single-parent Black homes in the first place nor the host of racial disparities that make it harder for Black people from any background to match the achievements of their White peers.

Pathologizing Black families and communities perpetuates segregation and leads to deadly consequences for these communities. In Biased, Jennifer Eberhardt points out that the more Black people live in a community, the more likely people (both Black and White) are to view that community as dangerous, disorderly, and so on. And because the myth of personal responsibility suggests that Black people choose these supposedly dangerous lifestyles, these communities are targeted by practices such as redlining (denying important services like mortgages, insurance, or grocery stores) and discriminatory policing (including the use of deadly force).

The Myth of Postracial America

Kendi argues that as the post-Civil Rights era settled in, one final myth emerged—the idea that racism is over. Kendi explains that as Black people gained legal protections and society moved away from open racism and discrimination, leaders started talking about a “color-blind” or “postracial” society. The idea of color-blindness seems appealing—it implies that nobody notices or cares about racial differences, which in turn suggests that racism is no longer an issue. But Kendi points out that not seeing race means not seeing the racial disparities that exist because of racism. He concludes that color-blindness and postracialism are inherently racist concepts because they obscure racist policies and their effects.

Moreover, he points out that postracialism undermines antiracist positions by delegitimizing any accusations of racism. As Kendi explains, postracial logic says that people who criticize racist policies or behaviors are themselves racist because they’re insisting on racial differences even though race isn’t an issue anymore. Kendi suggests that this is a new way of accusing someone of “playing the race card”—that is, exploiting their status as a racial minority as a political tool.

How the Idea of Postracialism Evolved—and Why It’s Wrong

In an article called “Our New Postracial Myth,” Kendi explains in more detail how the idea of postracialism arose during Obama’s first Presidential campaign and how it gradually evolved into a justification for racism.

Kendi says that with Obama’s early successes in his 2008 campaign, the media mistook his and his supporters’ calls for change as evidence that change had already happened. In other words, Kendi said, Obama’s success was taken as evidence that race no longer mattered to US voters. By the time Obama was elected President, the media was declaring that anti-Black racism was over.

Whereas this idea began as a misguidedly optimistic narrative of racial progress, Kendi suggests that it transformed into an excuse to ignore racial inequities and undermine antiracist activists. The logic is that because America is now postracial, people who call out racial injustice are themselves racist. Kendi argues that both versions of the postracial narrative are appealing in part because average White people don’t want to see themselves as racist, and postracialism reassures us as a society that we’re not.

Yet as Robin DiAngelo argues in White Fragility, racism isn’t just about individual people’s views or actions—it’s about systemic discrimination that causes systemic inequities. In other words, we can judge whether a society is racist by looking at its outcomes—and in the US, the outcomes reveal inequity that is, if anything, getting worse. For example, numerous studies conducted during and after Obama’s administration (that is, during the supposedly postracial period) have found that racial income and wealth gaps have been growing wider in recent years.

One factor has improved, though: Americans’ perceptions of racial equality. One study found that the average American estimates that from 1963 to 2016, Black families went from having half the wealth that White families had to having 90% of the wealth. The reality: In both 1963 and 2016, Black families had only 10% of the wealth that White families had. This discrepancy between our perception of racial equity and the reality of racial inequity might be part of why it’s so easy to underestimate racism’s impact.

Part 3: How to Fight Racism

After laying out his history of American racism, Kendi ends with some thoughts on how to eliminate (or at least minimize) racial disparities in society. He argues that we can never truly eliminate racism because there will always be people willing to advance themselves with racist policies and to invent racist ideas to justify these policies. And as we’ve seen, strategies like education and uplift do nothing to stop those policies or the ideas that spring from them.

Instead, Kendi argues, the solution is to defeat racist policies themselves—and keep them from coming back. To do so will require antiracists to achieve political power, enact antiracist policies, and hold on to their power (and policies) long enough for antiracist thought to become the new public common sense. At that point, Kendi says, the general populace will need to hold the government responsible for maintaining the newly antiracist society.

How to Be an Antiracist Society

Because Stamped from the Beginning is a history book, Kendi only sketches out a political plan and doesn’t go into much depth about how to defeat racist policies. However, in his second book, How to Be an Antiracist, he lays out a more detailed plan:

1) Figure out which policies are causing inequity and think of antiracist policies to replace them.

2) Determine who has the power to put antiracist policies into effect.

3) Educate the public about the racist policies and your proposed antiracist replacements. Persuade policymakers to adopt your proposed changes.

4) If that doesn’t work, use demonstrations and protests to move the public to action.

5) Make sure the new policies lead to more equitable outcomes. If they don’t, find new policies.

Kendi, a cancer survivor, likens racism to societal cancer. He argues that like cancer, racism eventually spreads to take over all of a society’s vital systems. If left unchecked, he says, racism will kill society as surely as cancer will kill a person. On the other hand, if we’re willing to acknowledge and fight racism, he says that antiracist policies work like chemotherapy, shrinking the racist “tumor” until it’s small enough for us to surgically remove any remaining racist policies. At that point, as with cancer, we should watch for the first signs that racism is returning, so that we can deal with it before it spreads and causes more harm.