Stamped from the beginning : the definitive history of racist ideas in America / Ibram X. Kendi.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 516-561) and index.

Part I. Cotton Mather -- Human hierarchy -- Origins of racist ideas -- Coming to America -- Saving souls, not bodies -- Black hunts -- Great awakening -- Part II. Thomas Jefferson -- Enlightenment -- Black exhibits -- Created equal -- Uplift suasion -- Big bottoms -- Colonization -- Part III. William Lloyd Garrison -- Gradual equality -- Imbruted or civilized -- Soul -- The impending crisis -- History's emancipator -- Ready for freedom? -- Reconstructing slavery -- Reconstructing blame -- Part IV. W.E.B. Du Bois -- Renewing the south -- Southern horrors -- Black Judases -- Great white hopes -- The Birth of a Nation -- Media suasion -- Old deal -- Freedom brand -- Massive resistance -- Part V. Angela Davis -- The act of civil rights -- Black power -- Law and order -- Reagan's drugs -- New Democrats -- New Republicans -- 99.9 percent the same -- The extraordinary Negro -- Epilogue.

Americans like to insist that we are living in a postracial, color-blind society. In fact, racist thought is alive and well; it has simply become more sophisticated and more insidious. And as historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas in this country have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. Stamped from the Beginning uses the lives of five major American intellectuals to offer a window into the contentious debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists. From Puritan minister Cotton Mather to Thomas Jefferson, from fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to brilliant scholar W.E.B. Du Bois to legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis, Kendi shows how and why some of our leading proslavery and pro-civil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America. As Kendi provocatively illustrates, racist thinking did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Racist ideas were created and popularized in an effort to defend deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and to rationalize the nation's racial inequities in everything from wealth to health. While racist ideas are easily produced and easily consumed, they can also be discredited.

National Book Award for Nonfiction, 2016