… brilliant and disturbing … While Stamped from the Beginning has won Kendi the 2016 National Book award for nonfiction, it has also disturbed some readers. This is because of the author’s fearless reappraisals of the words, actions and philosophies of some of the more revered heroes of American abolitionism and civil rights – including African American heroes … Kendi’s unusually original and groundbreaking analysis is the product of an almost clinical modus operandi … The analysis that emerges is delivered largely without sentimentality. This is not a historian fearful of upsetting orthodoxies or questioning fixed reputations … He goes where the evidence takes him, which is not to where he or we might want it to go … The methodical nature of Kendi’s approach does not render him blind to historical circumstance nor is he without sympathy for the figures he examines. This is not mechanistic history, but a measured laying out of a compelling, if discomfiting, thesis … Kendi’s other trick is to cleverly weave into his prose low but nuanced biographies of several legendary American figures…Through their speeches, diaries and letters, Kendi deftly makes the case that racial ideas have always been a functional necessity to a Christian nation that was economically founded upon slavery while being politically and philosophically dedicated to the principles of liberty and freedom … Kendi is at his most persuasive and powerful when he takes on the most basic assumption that underlies much thinking and writing about race in America – that racial ideas lead to racist policies … Perhaps what is most disturbing about Kendi’s work is that it shows how the same racial ideas, dressed in different period costumes, have been repeatedly used to explain away the deaths of generations of African Americans, slaves, victims of Jim Crow lynchings and, in the 21st-century, casualties of police shootings.
