Ibram X. Kendi

Kyle Pratt Amazon Review:
If a valid idea rests upon a solid grounding of facts then Stamped, by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi rests upon nothing more than sand. Within its pages, I found repeated generalizations. Inconvenient facts were glossed over and there were repeated factual errors.
I’ll start with a few generalizations. On page 174 where the authors discuss the 1968 presidential election, I read this.
“Wallace had taken a public stand for segregation the year before, and received 100,000 letters of support, mostly from northerners.
“Wait. What? Yep. Northerners. Sending in letters in support of Wallace’s stance for segregation. This proved painfully, that everyone—the North and South—hated Black people.” (Italics in original)
Readers are asked to believe that during the height of the civil rights movement, everyone in America hated Black people. On page 197 there is another generalization.
“And assimilationists were still trying to figure out why integration had failed. And the one thing that Black male assimilationists scholars kept arguing about was that Black masculinity was what was frightening to White men. That it was sexual jealousy that spawned systemic oppression…”
While the authors admit that some of this argument is ridiculous, they continue the theme until on page 199 where they state,
“And while the idea of Black masculinity was being challenged by Black women, White masculinity was being threatened, constantly, by Black men.”
Often when forced to admit inconvenient facts the authors gloss over them. On page 162, the authors say,
“Malcolm X was a minister in the Nation of Islam, a religious organization focused on the liberation of Black people through discipline, self-defense, community organization and a fortified understanding of who Black people were regardless of White people’s opinions.”
Multiple organizations, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Anti-Defamation League, have labeled the Nation of Islam a hate group that promotes racial prejudice towards white people, and of promoting anti-Semitism. You can read more about that here. Another gloss over is this reference to the curse myth found on page 13.
“Noah orders his White sons not to have sex with their wives on the ark, and then tells them that the first child born after the flood would inherit the earth. When the evil, tyrannical, and hypersexual Ham (goes HAM and) has sex on the ark, God wills that Ham’s descendants will be dark and disgusting and the whole world will look at them as symbols of trouble.”
The quote above is attributed to George Best, a travel writer who died in the 1500s and Best may have written some version of the quote. However, the authors use it without mentioning that it is not found in any translation of the Bible and few people today are familiar with George Best or the curse myth.
On page 47 the authors get the reasons for the American Revolution wrong.
“Remember, America was made up of a bunch of Europeans, specifically British people. They still owned America. It was their home away from home (hence New England). The British disapproval [of slavery] applied pressure to the American slavery system, which was the American economic system, and in order for America to feel comfortable with continuing slavery, they had to get away from, break free of, Britain once and for all.”
At the time of the American Revolution in 1776 slavery was legal in Britain and its colonies. Britain didn’t outlaw slavery in England until 1807, thirty-one years after the revolution. Furthermore, slavery remained legal in the British colonies until 1833. By that time, many states had outlawed slavery. The premise that the American Revolution occurred to continue slavery is false.
There are many more inaccurate or questionable quotes that I have made available in PDF form.
In another article dealing with Critical Race Theory I said that most Americans hoped that the dream of Martin Luther King Jr., would be fulfilled, his children would grow up in a nation where they would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” I concluded by saying that may not be possible because a new racism is spreading across America. The authors of Stamped see the world in three camps, segregationists are haters, assimilationists, such as Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Barak Obama, Clarence Thomas and many more are cowards. Antiracists, such as Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Angela Davis are the people who truly love.
Both Stamped and Stamped (For Kids) are built upon a foundation of inaccurate history and poor scholarship. Neither book should be in the tax-supported library of any city or school.… (plus d'informations)

An accomplished history of racist thought and practice in the United States from the Puritans to the present.

Anyone who thought that the 2008 election of President Barack Obama marked the emergence of post-racial America has been sorely disillusioned in the subsequent years with seemingly daily reminders of the schism wrought by racism and white supremacy. And yet anyone with even a cursory understanding of this country’s tortured history with race should have known better. In this tour de force, Kendi (African-American History/Univ. of Florida; The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972, 2012) explores the history of racist ideas—and their connection with racist practices—across American history. The author uses five main individuals as “tour guides” to investigate the development of racist ideas throughout the history of the U.S.: the preacher and intellectual Cotton Mather, Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, ardent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, and activist Angela Davis. Kendi also poses three broad schools of thought regarding racial matters throughout American history: segregationist, assimilationist, and anti-racist. Although this trio can be reductionist, it provides a solid framework for understanding the interplay between racist ideas, anti-racism, and the attempts to synthesize them—“assimilationism,” which the author ultimately identifies as simply another form of racism, even when advocated by African-Americans. The subtitle of the book promises a “definitive history,” but despite the book’s more than 500 pages of text, its structure and its viewing of racial ideas through the lens of five individuals means that it is almost necessarily episodic. Although it is a fine history, the narrative may best be read as an extended, sophisticated, and sometimes (justifiably) angry essay.

Racism is the enduring scar on the American consciousness. In this ambitious, magisterial book, Kendi reveals just how deep that scar cuts and why it endures, its barely subcutaneous pain still able to flare.

-Kirkus Review… (plus d'informations)