... 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 short 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.

... a lucid, accessible survey of how 'the people' were racialised over 500 years ... Kendi confidently re-evaluates the writings of many celebrated abolitionists and African-American heroes and concludes that racism often underpinned their strategies ... Kendi’s most important insight might help rethink anti-racist activism ... One might expect Kendi to be despondent, but he believes that eradicating discriminatory policies will consign racist ideas to the past ... an un-yielding narrative of racist ideas, violence and harm. However, the book is also a history of refusals.

... engrossing and relentless ... To his enormous credit, Kendi does not spare himself, admitting that before his book research, he unwittingly harbored prejudice ... The greatest service Kendi and provide[s] is the ruthless prosecution of American ideas about race for their tensions, contradictions and unintended consequences. And yet I have greater difficulty embracing the notion that, as Kendi argues, progress on race is inevitably stalked by the advance of racism and that, on an individual level, falling short in specific instances somehow taints the whole of a person ... The old one-drop rule for determining race was based on prejudice and pseudoscience. A one-drop rule for determining racism seems only slightly less unfair, no matter how well-intentioned.

... the copy editor was obviously distracted and failed to save the author from some very ugly phrase-making ... You should read it for its reminders about the ways in which many if not most whites in America have over the centuries demeaned and conceptualised blacks. And you should read it for its arguments about what racism is, even if in the end you are not obliged to agree with all of them. Nor should you dodge it on the basis that you knew all this already — like me, you almost certainly didn’t ... The difficulty is that the thesis seems to demand that any suggestion of any internal ill effect on black American populations, arising from whatever historical experience, is itself racist. But this notion, as we have discovered in this country in places such as Rotherham and Rochdale, can create an inhibition to analyse, let alone deal with genuinely catastrophic behaviour sometimes arising from group perceptions and identities. Any group, any identity. Perhaps racism is even more complex than even Stamped From the Beginning, however valuable it is, has quite grasped.

I can’t say whether Ibram X Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning will offend most white people (though I’m willing to bet it will offend some), but he damn sure names white supremacy for what it is ... [Kendi’s] research is exhaustive and his conclusions will surprise many ... Readers might find that Kendi spends a little too much time with Mather ... This book’s ultimately hopeful analysis doesn’t seem to hold sway at this moment, as the president, and much of the population, defends memorials that historians agree were put in place as symbols of white supremacy. But the struggle over these symbols might finally represent a slow recognition that something has changed, and perhaps it’s now the white supremacists who need to be 'assimilated' into an anti-racist future that is still beyond the nation’s grasp.

Kendi's provocative egalitarian argument combines prodigious reading and research with keen insights into the manipulative power of racist ideologies that suppress the recognition of diversity. This is a must for serious readers of American history, politics, or social thought.

... heavily researched yet easily readable ... The narrative smoothly weaves throughout history, culminating in the declaration that as much as we’d like it to be, America today is nowhere near the 'postracial' country that the media declared following the election of Barack Obama in 2008. The hope here is that by studying and remembering the lessons of history, we may be able to move forward to an equitable society.

An accomplished history ... [a] tour de force ... 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.