Booklist Reviews
This heavily researched yet easily readable volume explores the roots and the effects of racism in America. Kendi, assistant professor of African American history at the University of Florida, offers this history through chronologically arranged sections based on the lives of five figures from American history: socially and politically influential Puritan minister Cotton Mather; President Thomas Jefferson; prominent abolitionist and social reformer William Lloyd Garrison; civil rights activist and author W. E. B. Du Bois; and political activist and writer Angela Davis. Kendi posits that there is a three-way argument happening between segregationists, who blame black people for racial disparities; antiracists, who blame discrimination; and assimilationists, who think everyone is at fault. 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. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.
Library Journal Reviews
Kendi (African American history, Univ. of Florida; The Black Campus Movement) argues that deep beliefs in differences between blacks and whites reach back beyond America's colonial beginnings, and in order to explain the disparities that have persisted in white supremacy and black subordination, suggests that three distinct sets of voices—segregationists, assimilationists, and antiracists—have defined the dominant opinions. Segregationists and assimilationists represent obverse sides of the same coin in Kendi's view. Both accept the stamp of blackness as inferiority: one maintaining that it is biological and cannot be eradicated, the other contending it is behavioral and can be uprooted. Antiracists have rejected the concept by embracing human differences. Using examples ranging from the 1600s to the present, the author exposes the ideas that have formed the foundation of racial discrimination, employing as tour guides prominent Americans such as Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis. VERDICT 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.—Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
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