Publisher's Synopsis
Jason Reynolds' Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You is a nonfiction book published in 2020 by the American authors Jason Reynolds and Dr. Ibram X. Kendi. It is a self-described "remix" of Kendi's 2016 National Book Award winner Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. An award-winning writer of young adult fiction and poetry, Reynolds frames America's history of racist ideas for an audience of middle school and high school readers. Reynolds' remix is bookended by an introduction written by Kendi and an Afterword that transitions the reader out of the historical narrative and, hopefully, into antiracist action. This study guide refers to the 2020 hardcover edition published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.The book establishes several patterns through which to organize and understand historical racism in the United States. The authors divide "racist" and "not racist" into three categories: "segregationist" racism, the commitment to the separation and hierarchy of races; "assimilationist" racism, the push to integrate Black people into White society and abandon Blackness; and "antiracism," the school of thought that believes in full racial equality, period.Like Stamped from the Beginning, Stamped is divided into sections that cover distinct historical time periods, each anchored by a central historical figure who is representative of racist or antiracist developments in their lifetimes. Though the first section covers the broadest range of history and geography-African slave trading across the globe from 1415 to 1728-its main emphasis is the establishment of racist systems in the lands that became the United States. The leading racist intellectual of Colonial America was the Puritan minister Cotton Mather. The next segment ruminates on the contradictions in the racial ideology of Thomas Jefferson throughout his political career. In the third section, the authors discuss the antislavery ideology of editor William Lloyd Garrison and the politics of Abraham Lincoln. The fourth section centers on the long intellectual career of W. E. B. Du Bois, who shifted from assimilationism to antiracist activism in the 20th century. The last section focuses on Dr. Angela Davis, the Black feminist who embodies antiracist empowerment and resistance.
