“Stamped” means “branded” and refers to all the injuries black Americans have suffered over the centuries from slavery, discrimination, and violence. Five years ago it was the title of a critically acclaimed story of racism presented by the activist and historian Ibram X. Kendi, a thick and angry but very informative book that goes from the days of the Pilgrim Fathers to the ultimately frustrating review of Barack’s presidency Obamas leads. The children’s and youth writer Jason Reynolds has now cut down and reformulated this furious work into a non-fiction book for young people – in terms of style a lot sleeker, no less varied in terms of content, but just as radical.
It is a tough chunk and at the same time a worthwhile reading, because it owes many central theses to the so-called Critical Race Theory, which sees racism as the foundation of all white supremacy worldwide, not only in America, but also in all other liberal Western democracies. In the view of the advocates of this line of thought, a consistent overthrow would be necessary everywhere in the fight against this racism, because all enlightenment efforts or efforts aimed at understanding and assimilation are seen as infected by racism – ultimately as a further means of maintaining power for the white majority society.
This basic attitude of Ibram X. Kendis can also be felt in Jason Reynold’s version on every page – but you don’t have to follow that unconditionally. The spectrum ranges from the first Portuguese conquests in Africa to #Black Lives Matter, the depiction is marked by anger at the bitter and actively propagated racist rollback under Donald Trump. The book is deliberately designed in a polemical and uncompromising way – young people who are willing to think for themselves will benefit from reading it, who also look up Wikipedia to better understand the background or to discover abbreviations of the descriptions.
“Stamped” is biased through and through, but as one-sided as this view of history is, so clear are its theses and the questions that can be linked to it: Is racism really the origin of all black misery in the present and in history? Has racism been developed as a social model to underpin domination – or did it emerge from economic and socio-political structures? What about Martin Luther King’s dream of a society that no longer knows skin colors, but only character? Or about the interests of black women who not only fight against racism, but also against the macho attitudes of black men? Ibram X. Kendi and his colleagues ignore many such facets or only treat them incidentally – but at the same time they point out some things that find too little space in current, often superficially conceived, solidarity-based books on the topic of people of color.
You can be bothered by the radicalism of “Stamped”, but if you read at the same time the short, now almost sixty year old letter from James Baldwin, “My dungeon trembled” (in “After the flood, the fire”, dtv 2019), then one understands what has not changed for the better since then, for example until the death of George Floyd, why so much anger is a perfectly understandable answer to ongoing disadvantage.
Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi: Stamped. Racism and Anti-Racism in America. Translated from the English by Anja Hansen-Schmidt and Heike Schlatterer. dtv series Hanser, 2021. 256 pages, 17 euros.