Chávez-Moreno, L. C. (2018, October 29). Review of Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist ideas in America by I. X. Kendi. Education Review, 25. http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/er.v25.2407 October 31, 2018 ISSN 1094-5296 Kendi, I. X. (2016). Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist ideas in America. New York: Nation Books. Pp. 582 ISBN: 978-1-56858-598-7 A Review of Stamped from the Beginning: On a definitive history of anti-Black racism Reviewed by Laura C. Chávez-Moreno University of California, Los Angeles United States In Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, Ibram X. Kendi (2016) makes the book’s theme explicit and memorable: American racial progress and the progression of racism have advanced simultaneously throughout U.S. history. By racial progress, Kendi refers to antiracist ideas, policies, and practices, while the progression of racism indicates a continuation, even if altered, of racism. In the prologue, Kendi explains that: Stamped from the Beginning is not merely a history of overt racism becoming covert; nor is it a history of racial progress, or a history of ignorance and hate. Stamped from the Beginning rewrites the history of racist ideas by exposing the incompleteness of these three widely believed historical storylines. (p. 8) The book’s major lesson teaches that three competing ideas – segregationist, assimilationist, and antiracist ideas – concurrently have shaped both the U.S. as a nation generally and U.S. race relations. Thus, Education Review /Reseñas Educativas 2 while antiracist reformers have made progress, so too have racist (segregationist and assimilationist) reformers. To deliver this message, Stamped from the Beginning, a National Book Award winner and New York Times bestseller, surveys U.S. history through five parts, each featuring a prominent American: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, President Thomas Jefferson, White abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, founder of American scientific sociology W. E. B. Du Bois, and scholar and prison abolitionist Angela Davis. While chronicling how all three ideas are present in each character’s generation, Kendi moves readers through an arch of overt racism (Mather), to segregation that ignores cruelty because of self-interest (Jefferson), to well-intentioned assimilationism (Garrison), to struggling against assimilation and toward antiracism (Du Bois), and finally to unwavering antiracism (Davis). Kendi interweaves each period’s politics, popular culture, and scholarly debates in various fields (e.g., anthropology, genetics, and education) and shows how these developments reinforced or resisted racist ideas. He urges Americans to understand how these ideas haunt the country’s present, rather than to settle for the racist half-truth of racial advancement that overlooks the historical progression of racism. For the education field, the chapters on Du Bois and Davis offer the most germane commentary on contemporary issues such as school desegregation, standardized testing, and affirmative action in higher education. However, the most important lessons come from the author’s evaluation of uplift suasion, educational persuasion, and self-sacrifice (all used in the education field) as ineffective strategies toward antiracism. Education practitioners and scholars would benefit from reading the book with an eye toward Kendi’s critique of these three strategies. Kendi substantiates his appraisal of uplift suasion and educational persuasion, but lacks an equivalent treatment to the third strategy of self-sacrifice. He simply asserts that when White Americans have self- sacrificed, the results have been unfruitful in the quest for justice. His analysis of the strategies of uplift suasion and educational persuasion may contribute to rethinking the practices and reforms of some educational leaders who base their tactics on these strategies. Of particular note is his conclusion that educational persuasion is a futile strategy toward justice. One could consider whether multicultural teacher education engages in educational persuasion when teaching about racial oppression, assuming this practice influences the actions of teacher candidates. Indeed, education research has found mixed results in attempts to change teacher attitudes and practice (e.g., Cochran-Smith et al., 2013; Flores, Lewis, & Phuong, 2018; Kumar & Lauermann, 2018; Ladson-Billings, 1999; Wideen, Mayer-Smith, & Moon, 1998; Wiedeman, 2002), especially when engaging with White preservice teachers (e.g., Garmon, 2004; Picower, 2009). According to Kendi, history teaches that to eradicate racist ideas, we first must excise racist policies and practices. His analysis would prompt teacher educators to examine and eliminate racist policies and practices in their teacher education program, instead of focusing on changing an individual teacher candidate’s racist beliefs. In terms of how to achieve antiracism reforms, Kendi also posits that people with the “power to undermine racial discrimination” have done so when they realized that “eliminating some form of racial discrimination was in their self-interest” (p. 509). His conclusion adds to a critical race theory (CRT) debate in education about the utility of interest convergence as a tool toward antiracism (Alemán & Alemán, 2010; Burns, 2017; Donnor, 2005; Harper, 2009; Milner, 2008; Sung, 2017). Interest convergence, as coined and conceptualized by legal scholar and one of CRT founders Derrick Bell (1980), refers to instances where racial progress for Review of Stamped from the Beginning by I. X. Kendi 3 Black people was accomplished because the changes benefited White interests. Bell suggested that the reforms achieved through interest convergence ultimately do not lead to advancing a new and more just racial paradigm for Black folks. Notwithstanding Bell’s theory, some CRT scholars have proposed using CRT’s interest convergence as a tool toward antiracism (e.g., Donnor, 2005; Harper, 2009; Milner, 2008). If Kendi’s argument that antiracist reformers should find places where interests converge with other (at times) racist interests is convincing, social justice teacher education and other education areas could consider interest convergence as promising for passing antiracist policies. In the epilogue, Kendi reasserts that the subject of the book is anti-Black racist ideas – a necessary reminder to any reader left wanting to learn a history of racist ideas in America. This spotlights one limitation of the book. At times, this hefty tome reads as if Kendi framed anti-Black racist ideas as the quintessential racism. For example, when mentioning antiracist ideas toward other groups of color, Kendi explains, “the histories of anti-Asian, anti-Native, and anti-Latina/o racist ideas […] all sound eerily similar to this history of racist ideas” (p. 504), that is, anti-Black racism. Though he acknowledges that other groups of color suffer from legacies of racial oppression, this statement and other parts of the book implicitly communicate a Black-White binary. Additionally, this Black-White analysis may have facilitated Kendi’s reference of CRT’s critical whiteness studies as “one of [its] greatest offshoots” (p. 444). The education sub-field of Whiteness Studies has produced commendable research (e.g., Castagno, 2014; Leonardo, 2016); however, scholars also have utilized CRT to uncover Chicanx, Latinx, Asian American, and Native American experiences with racial oppression and to showcase their resilience (e.g., Brayboy, 2005; Ledesma & Calderón, 2015; Yosso, Villalpando, Delgado Bernal, & Solórzano, 2001). While the book has many strengths, for race specialists, Kendi’s undertheorization of how racism affects non-Black people of color undermines the subtitle’s claim that the book presents “the definitive history of racist ideas in America.” This critique does not imply that Kendi’s already ambitious and well-researched book should have included the histories of racist ideas against groups of color who are not Black. Scholarship on the specificity of Black experience is needed and valuable (Dumas, 2016). Rather, I suggest that readers remember Kendi’s early statement that Stamped from the Beginning is a history of “anti-Black racist ideas” (p. 5). Further, I would recommend to scholars, students, and future authors to specify anti-Black racism in the title if that is the focus of analysis. Overall, Stamped from the Beginning is an important work of public scholarship that succeeds in teaching a general education or non-academic audience about the continuing significance of race and racism. For secondary history and social studies teachers wanting a firmer grasp of the topic, Kendi exposes important ideas about racism that, although dominant in our society and lived experience, are omitted from many history lessons. Teacher educators and CRT scholars would benefit from reading the book with the intent to evaluate Kendi’s analysis of the three strategies and his conclusion of their failure. To education scholars of race studies, Stamped from the Beginning provides a comprehensive story with easily missed historical details about American anti-Black racism, but fails to provide a new paradigm for understanding racism. As a Chicana scholar, I recommend Kendi’s history to anyone with an interest in American racism as a readable page-turner of how anti-Black racist ideas have influenced the past and continue to impact our lives. Education Review /Reseñas Educativas 4 References Alemán, E., & Alemán, S. M. (2010). “Do Latin@ interests always have to ‘converge’ with White interests?”: (Re)claiming racial realism and interest-convergence in critical race theory praxis. Race Ethnicity & Education, 13(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613320903549644 Bell, D. A. (1980). Brown v. Board of Education and the interest-convergence dilemma. Harvard Law Review, 93(3), 518–533. Brayboy, B. M. J. (2005). Toward a tribal critical race theory in education. The Urban Review, 37(5), 425–446. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-005-0018-y Burns, M. (2017). “Compromises that we make”: Whiteness in the dual-language context. Bilingual Research Journal, 40(4), 339–352. https://doi.org/10.1080/15235882.2017.1388303 Castagno, A. E. (2014). Educated in whiteness: Good intentions and diversity in schools. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cochran-Smith, M., Villegas, A. M., Abrams, L., Chávez-Moreno, L. C., Mills, T., & Stern, R. (2013). Research on teacher preparation: Charting the landscape of a sprawling field. In D. Gitomer & C. Bell (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Teaching (5th ed., pp. 439–547). Washington, DC: AERA. Donnor, J. (2005). Towards an interest-convergence in the education of African-American football student athletes in major college sports. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 45–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000340999 Dumas, M. J. (2016). Against the dark: Antiblackness in education policy and discourse. 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The unexamined whiteness of teaching: How White teachers maintain and enact dominant racial ideologies. Race Ethnicity and Education, 12(2), 197–215. Review of Stamped from the Beginning by I. X. Kendi 5 Sung, K. K. (2017). “Accentuate the positive; eliminate the negative”: Hegemonic interest convergence, racialization of Latino poverty, and the 1968 Bilingual Education Act. Peabody Journal of Education, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/0161956X.2017.1324657 Wideen, M., Mayer-Smith, J., & Moon, B. (1998). A critical analysis of the research on learning to teach: Making the case for an ecological perspective on inquiry. Review of Educational Research, 68(2), 130. Wiedeman, C. R. (2002). Teacher preparation, social justice, equity: A review of the literature. Equity & Excellence in Education, 35(3), 200–211. https://doi.org/10.1080/713845323 Yosso, T., Villalpando, O., Delgado Bernal, D., & Solórzano, D. G. (2001). Critical race theory in Chicana/o education. Presented at the National Association for Chicana/Chicano Studies Annual Conference, Tucson, AZ. Retrieved from http://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/naccs/2001/Proceedings/9/ About the Reviewer Laura C. Chávez-Moreno is a Postdoctoral Scholar in UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. Guided by a background in ethnic studies and languages/literacies, Laura’s research engages questions about Chicanx/Latinx education, critical literacy, and racial equity. Her work on teaching and teachers has been published in the Handbook of research on teaching (5th ed.), Pennsylvania Language Forum, Peabody Journal of Education, and Journal of Teacher Education. Education Review /Reseñas Educativas 6 Education Review/Reseñas Educativas/Resenhas Educativas is supported by the edXchange initiative’s Scholarly Communications Group at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University. 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