Stamped

**Author:** Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

**Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

**What You'll Learn:** How racist ideas were deliberately created, spread, and embedded into American society, and how you can identify and challenge them today.

**Who This Book Is For:** Anyone who wants to understand the true history of racism in America, not the sanitized version taught in schools, and anyone ready to become actively antiracist.

Most Americans learn a story about racism that goes something like this. Slavery was terrible, but it ended. Segregation was wrong, but the civil rights movement fixed it. Racism still exists, but it lives in the hearts of a few ignorant people, and if we just wait long enough, it will fade away. This story is comfortable. It is also false. The real history of racism in America is not a story of steady progress from darkness to light. It is a story of three competing forces that have been fighting since before the nation existed. There are segregationists, people who believe that racial groups are fundamentally different and that some are superior to others. There are assimilationists, people who believe that racial inequality exists because Black people have not fully adopted white culture and values. And there are antiracists, people who believe that all racial groups are equal and that racist policies are the true cause of racial inequality. Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi wrote this book because the comfortable story is dangerous. When you believe racism is a relic of the past, you cannot see it operating in the present. When you believe racism is only about individual hatred, you miss the policies and systems that produce unequal outcomes regardless of individual intentions. When you believe time alone will solve the problem, you have no urgency to act. The word "stamped" in the title refers to the way racist ideas have been printed onto people and institutions, like a stamp marking something as permanently labeled. These ideas were not natural. They were invented, packaged, and sold. They were taught in schools, preached from pulpits, written into laws, and broadcast through media. They were used to justify slavery, to rationalize segregation, to explain away poverty, and to make inequality seem inevitable. This book traces the history of those ideas from their earliest origins in fifteenth-century Europe through the present day. It shows how racist ideas have always been tools of power, created by powerful people to justify their exploitation of others. It shows how assimilationist ideas have often been just as damaging as segregationist ideas, because they place the blame for inequality on Black people rather than on racist policies. And it shows how antiracist resistance has always existed, even when…