Harvard Book Store Presents:

Ibram X. Kendi

presenting

Stamped from the Beginning:
The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

Harvard Book Store welcomes Dr. IBRAM X. KENDI—Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University and founding director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research—to discuss the revised edition of his landmark text Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.

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Ticketing

Each ticket includes one paperback copy of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America SIGNED by the author.

About Stamped from the Beginning

Some Americans insist that we’re living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America — it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit.

In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. He uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to drive this history: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary activist Angela Davis.

As Kendi shows, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. They were created to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation’s racial inequities.

In shedding light on this history, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose racist thinking. In the process, he gives us reason to hope.

Praise for Stamped from the Beginning

“In his relentless odyssey through the making of America’s particular brand of prejudice . . . Kendi challenges our assumptions about racism by exposing the development of racist ideas-and their connection to racist actions and policies throughout our history.” —Stephenie Livingston, University of Florida

“Both a penetrating treatise and a wonderfully accessible work of intellectual history, Stamped from the Beginning reveals the heritage of ideas behind the modern dialectic of race-denial and race-obsession. By historicizing our entrenched logic of racial difference, Kendi shows why “I don’t see color” and other professions of post-racialism remain inexorable alibis for white supremacy. Stamped from the Beginning has done the cause of anti-racism a great service.” —Russell Rickford, author of We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination

“Ibram Kendi is an important new voice in African American intellectual and social history. This book, an intellectual history of racist ideas, promises to break important new ground for scholarly and general audiences interested in the construction of racism in America.” —Peniel E. Joseph, author of Stokely: A Life and Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour

Ibram X. Kendi

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, and the founding director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributing writer at The Atlanticand a CBS News racial justice contributor.

Photo Credit: Stephen Voss