Stamped from the Beginning: A Graphic History of Racist Ideas in America
“Stamped from the Beginning is an excellent, accessible primer on the history of U.S. racism. It straddles the centuries adroitly, introduces numerous historical figures and ideas foundational to racism, and shows us how the sins of the past continue to haunt the present.”
No matter what one knows about white supremacy before the Civil Rights era, the depravity, arrogance, and cruelty of the white majority in the U.S. never fails to inspire outrage. Time and again, African Americans try to assert their rights or to help the country live up to its stated ideals; time and again, they end up beaten and bloodied, swinging from trees, or burned alive. There’s no way to sugarcoat it and the author doesn’t try.
What becomes clear as this sobering history unfolds is that the deck was rigged from the start and the whole nation participated in the rigging: racist politicians, a judiciary set up to enforce white supremacy, police who turned a blind eye to lynchings, “scientists” who proclaimed the Black race to be inferior to the white, pastors who exhorted African Americans to serve their “masters.” The remarkable thing is that, against such absurd odds, African Americans managed to obtain not just their freedom but full rights as U.S. citizens, even if it took 350 years.
Stamped from the Beginning: A Graphic History of Racist Ideas in America is adapted from Ibram X. Kendi’s National Book Award-winning text. This new book consists of an illustrated chronology of U.S. racism from the 17th to the 21st century. It’s divided into five parts, each named for a prominent figure in U.S. history, plus an introduction and epilogue.
The illustrations are excellent. Historical figures are depicted across the centuries with clarity, wit, and an eye for period detail (muskets, feather quills, square buckles, stovepipe hats). Clever uses of graphics include racist comments being depicted in white font on a dripping black background. There are hundreds of them ranging from Darwin’s “Africans are descendants of the lowest savages” to novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “We [whites] need to teach Blacks until they have reached moral and intellectual maturity.” There are also enlarged depictions of official documents such as the Fifteenth Amendment, which provide both veracity and variety.
The narrative, too, is at times lively and fun—quite an achievement given the subject matter. There are enjoyably anachronistic uses of contemporary jargon and textese: “WTF?,” “Fake news!,” “for real.” Martin Luther King, who was assassinated in 1968, is seen at the podium declaiming, “I have a dream that white girls will tweet out Black Lives Matter on my birthday and change their profile pictures to images of me but will not do anything for our cause but everything for the ’gram.”
As regards the content, no one gets off lightly. Abraham Lincoln’s machinations are shown for what they were: he “freed the slaves” for political reasons as much as moral, and maintained racist views. Jefferson, too, is depicted unsentimentally as a slave owner who fathered six children with his Black mistress Sally Hemings. On his deathbed, he freed the Hemings family and left hundreds of others on his Monticello estate in bondage.
While not the fault of the author or illustrator, there is one nagging issue about the book: from a narrative standpoint, African American civil rights leaders are so much more interesting than white racists. Particularly in its first half, Stamped focuses on dozens of prominent white males in frock coats trying to justify their abhorrent views. This is inevitable bearing in mind the book’s subtitle, but it leaves the reader feeling that the real story is elsewhere.
For example, we have 28 pages of Cotton Mather pontificating from his place of white privilege, but only two pages of Nat Turner’s rebellion. The likes of John C. Calhoun (vice presidential apologist for slavery), Samuel Morton (skull measurer who spouted nonsense about Black people’s intelligence), and Edward Jarvis (psychiatrist who believed slavery benefited the slaves) are given relatively extended airtime, while the likes of Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Nina Simone, and others are barely mentioned.
Overall, though, Stamped from the Beginning is an excellent, accessible primer on the history of U.S. racism. It straddles the centuries adroitly, introduces numerous historical figures and ideas foundational to racism, and shows us how the sins of the past continue to haunt the present.