Stamped: Racisim, Antiracism, and You

by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

GENRE: Nonfiction, History

Adapted from Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning, this book examines American racism in the past and present, and how the insidious nature of racist thought forces us to examine our own beliefs and actions.

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author biography

Jason Reynolds is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of many award-winning books, including Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks, All American Boys (with Brendan Kiely), Long Way Down, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You (with Ibram X. Kendi), Stuntboy, In the Meantime (illustrated by Raúl the Third), and Ain’t Burned All the Bright (with artwork by Jason Griffin). The recipient of a Newbery Honor, a Printz Honor, an NAACP Image Award, and multiple Coretta Scott King honors, Reynolds is also the 2020-2022 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. He has appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, Late Night with Seth Meyers, CBS Sunday Morning, Good Morning America, and various media outlets. He is on faculty at Lesley University, for the Writing for Young People MFA Program and lives in Washington, DC. - Author's website

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Ibram X. Kendi is a National Book Award-winning and #1 New York Times bestselling author of five books for adults and three books for children. Professor Kendi is a contributor writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News Racial Justice Contributor.  

Professor Kendi is the author of The Black Campus Movement, which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize, and Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016. Professor Kendi also has produced five #1 New York Times bestsellers, including How to Be an Antiracist and Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, co-edited with Keisha Blain. 

Professor Kendi has published fourteen academic essays in books and academic journals, including The Journal of African American History, Journal of Social History, Journal of Black Studies, Journal of African American Studies, and The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture. He co-edits the Black Power Series at NYU Press with historian Ashley Farmer. 

Professor Kendi has been visiting professor at Brown University, a 2013 National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow, and postdoctoral fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. He was also the 2020-2021 Frances B. Cashin Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for the Advanced Study at Harvard University. Professor Kendi was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, and a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the “Genius Grant.” He was also elected to the Society of American Historians in 2021. 

His next book, How to Raise an Antiracist, and his next picture book, Goodnight Racism, will both be released in the summer of 2022. - Boston University Center for Antiracist Research

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reviews

Publisher's Weekly

Reynolds (Look Both Ways) lends his signature flair to remixing Kendi’s award-winning Stamped from the Beginning into a powerful “not a history book” primer on the historical roots and present-day manifestations of antiblack racism in America. In five sections, Reynolds’s conversational text discusses the influential figures, movements, and events that have propagated racist ideas, beginning in 1415 with the publication of the infamous work that laid the groundwork for subsequent religious justifications of enslaving African peoples and continuing through the “war on drugs” and #BlackLivesMatter. Employing a format that hews closely to Kendi’s original, Reynolds discusses and differentiates between segregationist (“a hater”), assimilationist (“a coward”), and antiracist (“someone who truly loves”) rhetoric via figures such as Angela Davis, W.E.B. DuBois, Thomas Jefferson, and Cotton Mather. Short chapters, lively phrasing (“You know what hits do—they spread”), and intentional breaks (“Time Out,” “Let’s all just take a deep breath”) help maintain a brisk, compelling pace. Told impressively economically, loaded with historical details that connect clearly to current experiences, and bolstered with suggested reading and listening selected specifically for young readers, Kendi and Reynolds’s volume is essential, meaningfully accessible reading. Ages 12–up. (Mar.) --Staff (Reviewed 01/27/2020) (Publishers Weekly, vol 267, issue 4, p)

Kirkus Reviews

Award-winning author Reynolds (Look Both Ways, 2019, etc.) presents a young readers' version of American University professor Kendi's (How to Be an Antiracist, 2019, etc.) Stamped From the Beginning (2016). This volume, which is "not a history book," chronicles racist ideology, specifically anti-blackness in the U.S., from its genesis to its pernicious manifestations in the present day. In an open, conversational tone, Reynolds makes it clear that anti-black racist ideology in the U.S. has consistently relied on the erroneous belief that African people (and black people in general) are "dumb" and "savage," ideas perpetuated through the written word, other media, and pseudo-science. Using separationist, assimilationist, and anti-racist historical figures, a direct line is drawn throughout U.S history from chattel slavery through the Civil War, Jim Crow, the civil rights era, the war on drugs, and #BlackLivesMatter, with plenty of little-known, compelling, and disturbing details inserted. Readers who want to truly understand how deeply embedded racism is in the very fabric of the U.S., its history, and its systems will come away educated and enlightened. It's a monumental feat to chronicle in so few pages the history of not only anti-black racism in the U.S., but also assimilationist and anti-racist thought as well. In the process it succeeds at connecting "history directly...to our lives as we live them right this minute." Worthy of inclusion in every home and in curricula and libraries everywhere. Impressive and much needed. (Nonfiction. 12-adult) -- (Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2019)

Long Way Down

by Jason Reynolds

Driven by the secrets and vengeance that mark his street culture, 15-year-old Will contemplates over the course of 60 psychologically suspenseful seconds whether or not he is going to murder the person who killed his brother.

How to Be an Antiracist

Ibram X. Kendi

From the National Book Award–winning author comes a bracingly original approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society—and in ourselves. Ibram X. Kendi’s concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America—but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other.

Between the World and Me

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Told through the author's own evolving understanding of the subject over the course of his life comes a bold and personal investigation into America's racial history and its contemporary echoes.