An Antiracist Critique of Stamped from the Beginning

The Problem

Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning is a colossal work of antiracism. The book offers a sweeping history of racist ideas in the U.S.—“from their origins in fifteenth-century Europe, through colonial times when the early British settlers carried racist ideas to America, all the way to the twenty-first century and current debates about the events taking place on our streets.” At each turn, Kendi provides penetrating antiracist critiques of these ideas and the practices they empower. Surely, we are in Kendi’s debt.

Yet Stamped has a glaring problem: It isn’t what it claims to be. The book’s subtitle declares it “the definitive history of racist ideas in America,” and Kendi contends that it narrates “the entire history of racist ideas.” But neither claim is true. And they can’t be—because Stamped operates within a Black-white binary.

The title’s origins foreshadows this limitation. While rejecting Black racial equality with whites, Jefferson Davis, the eventual president of the Confederate States, declared inequality of the white and [B]lack races” was “stamped from the beginning.” Those framing Stamped’s antiracist history match Davis’s Black-white scheme. Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis, respectively—all are racialized Black or white.

Kendi’s conceptual presentation perpetuates the same binary. While arguing that anyone can hold racist or antiracist ideas, Kendi speaks in a Black-white key.

Racist ideas are ideas. Anyone can produce or consume them, as Stamped from the Beginning’s interracial cast of producers and consumers show. Anyone—Whites, Latina/os, Blacks, Asians, Native Americans—anyone can express the idea that Black people are inferior, that something is wrong with Black people. Anyone can believe both racist and antiracist, that certain things are wrong with Black people and other things are equal. Fooled by racist ideas, I did not fully realize that the only thing wrong with Black people is that we think something is wrong with Black people. I did not fully realize that the only thing extraordinary about White people is that they think something is extraordinary about White people.

Though Kendi mentions several racial groups, he focuses on Blacks and whites; others receive parenthetical treatment. Kendi’s description of antiracism strikes a similar cord:

I am not saying all individuals who happen to identify as Black (or White or Latina/o or Asian or Native American) are equal in all ways. I am saying that there is nothing wrong with Black people as a group, or with any other racial group. That is what it truly means to think as an antiracist, to think there is nothing wrong with Black people, to think that racial groups are equal.

Yes, Kendi references non-white and non-Black racial groups. But he places them in parentheses and supplemental clauses. He sets them in the margins.

The marginalization of non-Black racialized minority groups and the racist ideas against them pervades Stamped. The systematic stealing of Indigenous lands; the building of Indian reservations; the forcing of Indigenous peoples into heritage-killing boarding schools; the Anglo-Americanizing of formerly Mexican lands and their peoples; the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act; the constructing of the Asiatic Barred Zone; and the interning of Japanese people—none of these racialized events or the racist ideas inciting them receive attention. Thus, Stamped sidelines the racially marginalized, omitting their histories while claiming to treat “the entire history of racist ideas.”

So What?

If Stamped operates on a Black-white binary, it’s not unique. Countless academic and popular treatments of race and racism do likewise. Why does Kendi’s omissions warrant consideration?

Most reviews suggest it doesn’t. Popular reviews in Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, and New Statesman are silent about the Black-white binary’s presence or impact on Stamped. The same holds for academic reviews in Library Journal, The Journal of Southern History, and Reviews in History. A noticeable exception is Matthew Frye Jacobson’s review in The Journal of American History: “[Specialists] may be frustrated that this ‘definitive history of racist ideas’ hews so tightly to the white-black binary, when Asian American studies, Latino/a studies, and indigenous studies have so crucially contributed to our understanding of race and its operations.”

Jacobson’s remark is unjust. Elite “specialists” don’t have the market on frustrations about antiracist texts functioning on a Black-white binary. Jacobson’s comment ignores the cries of non-Black racialized minority communities; like Stamped, Jacobson’s review marginalizes the marginalized. Race-conscious Asians, Indigenous persons, Latinas/os, and Middle Easterners daily voice righteous indignation about treatments of race that render their racialized histories invisible because the treatments presume and operate within a Black-white binary. Robert Chang, Angela Harris, Mari Matsuda, Elizabeth Martinez, Rachel Moran, Juan Perea, and Frank Wu noted this in the 90s. And Christians including Andrea Smith, Love Sechrest, Soong-Chan Rah, and Robert Choa Romero continue to amplify these voices. Consider the opening lines of Romero’s poem “The Brown Church.”

I am the Brown Church

God calls me mija/mijo

Brown, black, white, even yellow, are all within me

When Black and White come to talk, my voice is not heard,

I am not invited to the table

I share much with my Black sisters and brothers, yet my voice is distinct

I long, I cry out to be heard for who I am

THE BROWN CHURCH

The cries of racialized minorities disclose similar and distinct forms of oppression operating across racial lines. Mexicans, for example, were lynched, segregated into separate but unequal schools, barred from public parks, denied restaurant service, prohibited from attending white Churches, and refused burial plots in white cemeteries during Jim and Jane Crow. And it was Mendez v. Wesminster School District of Orange County’s decision to outlaw segregating Mexicans from schools that gave Thurgood Marshall, Robert L. Carter, and Loren Miller a template for Brown v. Board. Similar experiences of racial oppression legitimized by related but distinct racist ideas gave Latinas/os and Blacks resources for collaborating on antiracist cases. The same applied to movements and protests. Angela Davis, a key figure in Stamped, says as much in her Autobiography. Yet Kendi’s history of racist ideas is silent about these ties. So are his reviewers.

Like Romero, the Church must speak out against the Black-white binary’s impact. If part of the Church suffers, the whole suffers (1 Cor. 12:26). When a monumental, award-winning book claiming to treat the entire history of racist ideas omits histories of racist ideas weaponized against oppressed racialized minority groups within the Church, those neglected groups suffer. So does their Church. Christians therefore have ecclesiastical reasons to celebrate Stamped from the Beginning’s antiracist gains and lament its binary-induced shortcomings.