Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

Jason Reynolds’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You (2020) is a nonfiction book by the American authors Jason Reynolds and Dr. Ibram X. Kendi. It is a self-described “remix” of Kendi’s 2016 National Book Award winner Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. An award-winning writer of young adult fiction and poetry, Reynolds frames America’s history of racist ideas for an audience of middle school and high school readers. Reynolds’s remix is bookended by an introduction written by Kendi and an Afterword that transitions the reader out of the historical narrative and, hopefully, into antiracist action. This study guide refers to the 2020 hardcover edition published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.

The book establishes several patterns through which to organize and understand historical racism in the United States. The authors divide “racist” and “not racist” into three categories: “segregationist” racism, the commitment to the separation and hierarchy of races; “assimilationist” racism, the push to integrate Black people into white society and abandon Blackness; and “antiracism,” the school of thought that believes in full racial equality.

Like Stamped from the Beginning, Stamped is divided into sections that cover distinct historical time periods, each anchored by a central historical figure who is representative of racist or antiracist developments in their lifetimes.