Reviews tagging 'Sexism'

Gebrandmarkt: Die wahre Geschichte des Rassismus in Amerika by Ibram X. Kendi

12 reviews

infinite_harness9030's review against another edition

challenging dark informative reflective slow-paced

4.25

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Racial slurs, Racism, and Slavery

Moderate: Confinement, Physical abuse, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Violence, Xenophobia, Police brutality, Trafficking, Colonisation, and Classism

Minor: Death, Genocide, Hate crime, Misogyny, Kidnapping, and Deportation

overbooked207's review against another edition

dark emotional informative reflective fast-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Ableism, Adult/minor relationship, Body horror, Body shaming, Bullying, Child abuse, Child death, Confinement, Cursing, Death, Domestic abuse, Drug abuse, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Genocide, Gore, Gun violence, Hate crime, Homophobia, Infidelity, Mental illness, Misogyny, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Racial slurs, Racism, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Slavery, Torture, Toxic relationship, Transphobia, Violence, Forced institutionalization, Xenophobia, Blood, Police brutality, Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Medical content, Trafficking, Kidnapping, Grief, Mass/school shootings, Medical trauma, Death of parent, Murder, Pregnancy, Fire/Fire injury, Cultural appropriation, Gaslighting, Alcohol, Sexual harassment, Colonisation, Injury/Injury detail, Classism, Deportation, and Pandemic/Epidemic

fkshg8465's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad slow-paced

5.0

This is a very dense book. It will need to be reread many times because the first read was like a primer. I took as many notes as I could. I gave myself a little affirming wink whenever I saw a book referenced that I’d already read and jotted down others that are more on my TBR list. Of all the books I’ve read by this author, this one was the heaviest. This one will ground me, whereas the others activate me.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Addiction, Body shaming, Child abuse, Child death, Confinement, Death, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Genocide, Gun violence, Hate crime, Homophobia, Infidelity, Misogyny, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Racial slurs, Racism, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Slavery, Torture, Toxic relationship, Transphobia, Violence, Forced institutionalization, Xenophobia, Blood, Police brutality, Trafficking, Kidnapping, Grief, Religious bigotry, Medical trauma, Death of parent, Murder, Pregnancy, Lesbophobia, Cultural appropriation, Gaslighting, Sexual harassment, Colonisation, War, Injury/Injury detail, Classism, and Pandemic/Epidemic

asainspace's review against another edition

informative reflective medium-paced

4.5

Comprehensive, useful, readable history of anti-Black racism in America.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death, Misogyny, Racial slurs, Racism, Rape, Sexism, Sexual violence, Slavery, Suicide, Xenophobia, and Police brutality

Moderate: Genocide and Trafficking

Minor: Islamophobia and War

bookcheshirecat's review against another edition

4.0

 “The principal function of racist ideas in American history has been the suppression of resistance to racial discrimination and its resulting racial disparities. The beneficiaries of slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration have produced racist ideas of Black people being best suited for or deserving of the confines of slavery, segregation, or the jail cell. Consumers of these racist ideas have been led to believe there is something wrong with Black people, and not the policies that have enslaved, oppressed, and confined so many Black people.”

➽ Stamped is a comprehensible history about race and racism in America! I read the version retold by Jason Reynolds and wasn’t satisfied with how it modernized and left out important aspects of history. Therefore I was planning on reading the original version by Ibram X. Kendi, as it dives much deeper into the historical background and important key figures of the different eras! I enjoyed listening to the audiobook and learning more about the topic, though there was a lot of information and things I’d have to reread in the future to fully take them in! 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Racism, Sexism, Sexual assault, Slavery, and Police brutality

ladygetslit's review against another edition

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Racial slurs, Racism, Sexism, Slavery, and Classism

Moderate: Hate crime, Homophobia, and Sexual assault

tangleroot_eli's review against another edition

challenging informative inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

A powerful, challenging, and necessary read.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Misogyny, Racial slurs, Racism, Sexism, Slavery, and Xenophobia

kyrstin_p1989's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

This book takes us from our nation’s inception through the presidency of Barack Obama. It highlights three main race ideologies and explicates about each one over the decades. Segregationists, those who believe Black folx are genetically inferior and don’t believe in equality; assimilationists, who believe that Black people need to try harder to become better people (aka more white); and antiracists, who believe that systems of inequality and discrimination have always been the culprit of inequity in American society. This book points out that both segregationists and assimilationists are racist, even if the latter would try to have you believe otherwise. I learned a lot about our country’s history, policies, and leaders that will help inform my continued efforts to be antiracist moving forward and will help me focus on Black freedom in this country and beyond.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Bullying, Genocide, Racial slurs, Racism, Sexism, Slavery, Violence, Xenophobia, Police brutality, Islamophobia, Cultural appropriation, Gaslighting, Colonisation, and War

rupl's review against another edition

challenging emotional informative reflective slow-paced

5.0

Dense, detailed look at US history from a lens completely overlooked in the US school system. You'll brush with basic facts you learned long ago, but their rich stories might be completely new. This book calmly yet passionately tells another US history, using five major characters to guide us through various eras.

I learned new parts of history and re-learned many others, all the while learning not to characterize individuals, but each of their actions. The book compiles countless examples of segregation, assimilation, and finally antiracism, from fleeting moments to entire legacies of individuals. By methodically reading from start to finish, and looking at example after example of each ideology I formed a better, more accurate view of history as it relates to power, racist policy erected to protect the powerful, and the racist ideas that get created in order to defend racist policies.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Gun violence, Hate crime, Racial slurs, Racism, Slavery, and Police brutality

Moderate: Homophobia, Violence, Antisemitism, Murder, and Colonisation

Minor: Misogyny, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, and Sexual violence

sherbertwells's review against another edition

challenging dark informative reflective slow-paced

4.0

“Time and again, racist ideas have not been cooked up from the boiling pot of ignorance and hate. Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era’s racial disparities away from those policies and onto Black people.”

Stamped from the Beginning is brilliant, not only in its content but its form.

I expected Ibram X. Kendi’s award-winning nonfiction book to retell American history with scholarly nuance and antiracist passion. And it does that, exploring forgotten corners of history and examining famous figures in a new light.

Stamped from the Beginning is subtitled “The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” and that history is long and complicated. According to Kendi, historical and present-day antiracists have contended not only against segregationist theories, which blame Black people for the discrimination they experience, but assimiliationist ones, which agknowledge racism but force Black people to conform to a white cultural standard. Chritianity and the “natural laws” of the Enlightenment, slavery and Reaganomics, sociology and fiction have acted as tools of opression, even under the guise of “uplift suasion.” To guide the readers through such diverse eras and media, Kendi focuses on five “main characters”: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. DuBois and Angela Davis, each of whom progressed racist and/or antiracist discourse.

Kendi is nuanced as heck. He introduces modern antiracist concepts like intersectionality and outdated racist theories like polygensis with the same precision. He acknowledges that segregationist, assimilationist and antiracist theories often coexisted within the same people or groups. While he’s not afraid to examine the racist ideas held by American icons across the political spectrum (Eugene Debs makes a surprise appearance!), he’s more interested in explaining than condemning.

“Frankly speaking, for generations of Americans, racist ideas have been their common sense. The simple logic of racist ideas has manipulated millions over the years, muffling the more complex antiracist reality again and again” (4)

According to the acknowledgements, Kendi began Stamped from the Beginning as a history of Black Studies in academia, but, like Tolstoy writing War and Peace, got carried away with context. Remarkably, he chose to turn his scholarly expertise into a work of popular history. Aside from a few unwieldy metaphors—Africans who believed in ethnic hierarchies “smacked the racist chicken and enjoyed its racist eggs”—the prose is both scholarly and readable (83). By examining Kendi’s style and line of reasoning, I learned a lot about how to write nonfiction for a nonacademic audience.

Of course, Stamped from the Beginning isn’t absolutely perfect. For one, most of the racist ideas Kendi covers are anti-Black, and other minorities (and racist ideas about them) are only mentioned in passing. He also argues that “media suasion” failed to improve the public image of African Americans, while racist works like Gone with the Wind and The Birth of a Nation fueled prejudice, without explaining the difference. But these complains merely agknowledge the breath of scholarship that has yet to be done—or that I have yet to encounter.

When Four Hundred Souls, a nonfiction collection edited by Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, comes out in paperback, I will purchase it without hesitation. While Kendi argues that discrimination precedes racist ideas, antiracist works like Stamped from the Beginning are essential for building a better future.

“No power lasts forever. There will come a time when Americans will realize that the only thing wrong with Black people is that they think something is wrong with Black people. There will come a time wehn racist ideas will no longer obstruct us from seeing the complete and utter abnormality of racial disparities. There will come a time when we will love humanity, when we will gain the courage to fight for an equitable society for our beloved humanity, knowing, intelligently, that when we fight for humanity, we are fighting for ourselves. There will come a time. Maybe, just maybe, that time is now” (511)

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Racism and Slavery

Moderate: Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Medical content, and Medical trauma

Minor: Genocide and Homophobia