Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

Abstract

Reviewed by: Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi Janaka B. Lewis (bio) Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You. By Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. Little, Brown, and Company, 2020. Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You is billed as a remix of Ibram X. Kendi’s earlier book Stamped from the Beginning, which won the 2016 National Book Award for nonfiction. In this new book, Kendi, a scholar of African American history, and [End Page 417] Jason Reynolds, an author of novels for young adults and middle-grade readers, write about race and the “r-word: racism.” Stamped was originally published March 10, 2020, just days before the impact of COVID-19 spread wildly through the United States and weeks before the release of the videoed deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd and the media reports of the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and others at the hands of the police rocked our nation. Stamped offers an incredibly comprehensive context of the existence, relevance, and significance of race and racism in American history in ways that middle-grade students and young adult through adults can understand and, more importantly, can use to shape potentially difficult but necessary dialogue on how we got to this moment. Reynolds and Kendi separate the book into an introduction and five sections from 1415 to today. The introduction, addressed from Kendi to the reader, states, “To know the past is to know the present. To know the present is to know yourself. I write about the history of racism to understand racism today. I want to understand racism today to understand how it is affecting me today. I want you to understand racism today to understand how it is affecting you and America today” (ix). Kendi describes the book as “a narrative history of racist and antiracist ideas,” defining both: “a racist idea is any idea that suggests something is wrong or right, superior or inferior, better or worse about a racial group. An antiracist idea is any idea that suggests that racial groups are equals”; furthermore, “racist and antiracist ideas have lived in human minds for nearly six hundred years” (ix). Kendi describes how, after watching the television coverage of the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Darnesha Harris, and Michael Brown (all aged twelve to eighteen), he didn’t just want to write about racist ideas, but discover the source of them. He wanted readers to understand how and why Black people are blamed for social inequity, how arguments persist that there is something inherently wrong with them that makes them more likely to be incarcerated (at 40 percent) and in need of increased restriction and regulation. Specifically, the book addresses the understanding of racial inequity from the racist politics of enslavement beginning 1415–1728 through subsequent periods 1743–1826, 1826–1879, 1868–1963, and 1963-today. The first chapter, “The Story of the World’s First Racist,” discusses the story of Prince Henry of Portugal who convinced his father King John to capture the main Muslim trading depot on the tip of Morocco to steel gold and take human prisoners then promoted the depiction of Africans as savage animals via a publication by his commander Zurara. Kendi and Reynolds cover twenty-eight specific chapters with numerous studies of American race and racism. They discuss theories of slavery brought to colonized America by Puritan ministers John Cotton and Richard Mather who built both churches and systems of power and hierarchies and subsequent systems of segregation to preserve social capital through religion and access to education [End Page 418] (the creation of White privileges through planter Nathaniel Bacon’s rebellion to use the Susquehannocks to turn poor White and Black people against each other in seventeenth-century Virginia). Covering the Salem Witch Trials (which used both race and gender to instill fear of “others”) as part of a system of what the authors call “political play,” the book discusses ways new codes are developed that prevent interracial relationships, classify Native and Black people as livestock, prevent the holding of office, and eliminate property holding by enslaved people while White indentured servants were freed and awarded fifty acres of...