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

Ibram X. Kendi's sprawling, epic treatment of racist ideas in America is at once too ambitious and not sufficiently ambitious. Framed according to a novel design by which five historical figures—Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis—steward readers across the arc of time, the book is breathtaking in its capaciousness. Setting out from Puritan settlements in North America in 1635 (from Aristotelian notions of human hierarchy, actually), approximately 511 pages later the author delivers us to our own moment in Barack Obama's decidedly not “postracial” America, hitting all the expected station stops along the way—colonial charters, the “Sons of Ham” mythology,…