Ibram X. Kendi, the multiple versions of Stamped, & thinking about how to be an antiracist.
In July, Good Trouble For Kids is featuring the two versions of Stamped that have been “re-mixed” for young adults and middle readers. This write-up specifically addresses the YA one co-written by Jason Reynolds, but can be read alongside the recently released Stamped (for Kids) adapted by Sonja Cherry-Paul.
Racism, Antiracism, & You: An Introduction
I learned so much from this book, re-mixed for a young adult audience. I’d already read Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be An Antiracist, and one of the very first books we featured was his board book, Antiracist Baby (which I loved!) But it is Jason Reynolds’ voice that jumps out at you right away in these modified versions of Kendi’s original Stamped. If you read All American Boys, the 15+ category book we featured in December 2020, you will recognize Reynolds’ voice here. Reynolds has the ability to make the difficult stuff go down a little smoother (like “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”!) I don’t cite this lightly: Kendi and Reynolds are literally offering medicine to their readers of all the various age groups. If you absorb what they teach, it cannot help but change you and make you look at the world differently.
There have been so many antiracist booklists published since George Floyd’s death, and bookstores have sold out of many of them. I am a fan of this list compiled by Kendi and published by the New York Times. I particularly like that his list includes literary texts like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Here’s another interesting list. I am a firm believer that reading literature — fiction, creative nonfiction, memoir — can provide the greatest insights into people that we might otherwise be quick to “other.” I think of the phenomenal rise of Jewish American literature in this country — Grace Paley, Chaim Potok, Leon Uris, Henry Roth, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Maxine Kumin, Michael Chabon, Anita Diamant, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nathan Englander, Nicole Krauss, to name just a few and in no particular order — and how those writers opened windows onto worlds that many would never have known about, including the legacy of the Holocaust for Americans who knew very little about the mid-century genocide of six million Jews. Just as importantly, Jewish American literature allowed Jews to see themselves reflected in the pages of a book — and not just as secularized Americans, but in their fully embodied cultural selves.
As much as I recommend books like Kendi’s How To Be An Antiracist or Ijeoma Olua’s So You Want To Talk About Race or Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, I recommend even more taking a really deep dive into Black literature. Reading Black. Think about the last ten books you’ve read. How many are by Black authors? How many feature Black characters? Look at your kids’ school curricula, and ask the same questions. What are your kids being taught about Black American history? How many of them are familiar with these five facts published by the ACLU?Are teachers drawing on the phenomenal work of the 1619 project? Are your kids learning about Black feminists when they learn about suffrage history? How about music classes? Are your students learning how great a debt American music owes to Black Americans? As this short read points out, “From the turn of the 20th century to modern times, African American music has been the heartbeat of America and emulated around the world.” What do the Language Arts reading lists look like? How many of the picture books show many-colored faces? How about beginning readers? Are they given modernized Dick and Jane readers, or are they being given stories grounded in multiculturalism? Have your middle readers been introduced to literature that reflects a generation of authors committed to promoting diversity? High school reading lists should now be packed full of inclusive authors covering a gamut of pluralistic experiences.
We founded Good Trouble For Kids with the mission of helping parents get books devoted to these issues into your children’s hands.
I would be thrilled to see Kendi’s and Reynolds book become a staple in American history middle and high school classes. Stamped provides an incredibly digestible way of presenting the history of racism in the US.
I will not use this write-up to spit back facts already presented by Reynolds and Kendi. But I will point out a few of the facts that made me do what I love to do best: go down the rabbit-hole. I hope a book like this one encourages you to do the same.
The Black Witch of Salem
My husband is from Salem, MA, and I have always been intrigued by the Salem witch trials, particularly how they show up in literature like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Kendi/ Reynolds write that “the Salem witch hunt made the Black face the face of criminality” (33).They don’t go into much more depth about this, but I found a good piece in The Smithsonian about the slave Tituba, the first woman to be accused of witchcraft in the 1693 trials. In the court trials she is referred to as Indian, but over time, Tituba has morphed into the “Black witch of Salem.” This article in History says that she was most likely an indigenous Central American, and was purchased by Parris in Barbados. And this article says she was definitively an Arawak Indian (some of the comments on this article are disturbingly not antiracist). Henry Wadsworth Longfellow has Tituba as a character in an 1868 play, where her father is described as “black and fierce” and an “Obi man” who taught her magic. William Carlos Williams, whose mother was Puerto Rican, and whose father was raised in the Dominican Republic, identifies Tituba as Carribean in his play “Tituba’s Children.” Miller calls her a “negro slave” in The Crucible. What seems most important in the context of Kendi/ Reynold’s book is the fact that Tituba is a very early example of a woman of color being scapegoated. While doing this research on Tituba, I discovered that Maryse Conde, an author born in Guadaloupe, wrote a contemporary novel, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, that re-imagines the Tituba story and offers “an affirmation of a courageous and resourceful woman’s capacity for survival” (New York Times book review).
Phyllis Wheatley
Kendi/ Reynolds write that Phyllis Wheatley, the first published Black American poet, was “purchased by the Wheatley family who wanted a daughter to replace the one they’d lost… Phyllis would be that stand-in. And because she was a “daughter” she was actually never a working slave and even homeschooled.” (44). There is so much to unpack in this sentence, perhaps most importantly that “daughter” is in quotes, because for all the care the Wheatleys may have provided, she was a slave from the age of 7 to 21, and a free woman for only the last decade of her life, before her very early death in 1784. It is a complex and tragic story, and the Poetry Foundation biography concludes:
“Wheatley was manumitted some three months before Mrs. Wheatley died on March 3, 1774. Although many British editorials castigated the Wheatleys for keeping Wheatley in slavery while presenting her to London as the African genius, the family had provided an ambiguous haven for the poet. Wheatley was kept in a servant’s place-a respectable arm’s length from the Wheatleys’ genteel circles-but she had experienced neither slavery’s treacherous demands nor the harsh economic exclusions pervasive in a free-black existence. With the death of her benefactor, Wheatley slipped toward this tenuous life. Mary Wheatley and her father died in 1778; Nathaniel, who had married and moved to England, died in 1783. Throughout the lean years of the war and the following depression, the assault of these racial realities was more than her sickly body or aesthetic soul could withstand . . . Phillis Wheatley Peters died, uncared for and alone… interpretation has proven Wheatley Peter’s disdain for the institution of slavery and her use of art to undermine its practice. Before the end of this century the full aesthetic, political, and religious implications of her art and even more salient facts about her life and works will surely be known and celebrated by all who study the 18th century and by all who revere this woman, a most important poet in the American literary canon.”
Sally Hemings, DNA, Strom Thurmond, etc.
I don’t think it comes as a surprise to many anymore that the DNA evidence points to the irrefutable fact that Thomas Jefferson had children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. When I took my children on a visit to Monticello, this was not widely discussed in the tour, and to our dismay slaves were often referred to as “servants.” I was particularly discomfited by this, especially since my bi-racial daughter was highly aware that Jefferson had had slaves. I eventually called out the tour guide on this point, and was politely informed that the “servant” language was meant to be more comfortable to some of the tourists (!) I would assume this is not the case any longer, especially in light of the relatively new exhibit on Sally Hemings on display at Monticello that correctly addresses the power dynamics between Jefferson and Hemings (“Sex, Power and Ownership”) and uses the word rape (with a question mark).
The Black American historian, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has done an incredible amount of research on the uses of DNA in his decade long show Finding Your Roots, and the “surprise” of so many discovering they were not “pure” anything. As Gates himself discovered, his own DNA revealed that he was “50 percent sub-Saharan African and 50 percent European and virtually no Native American ancestry” and that he is “descended from — on my father’s side — from a white man who impregnated a black woman and, on my mother’s side, from a white woman who was impregnated by a black man” ( NPR Interview). In that same interview, Gates offers this explanation for why he has invested so much in DNA research: “The lesson of “Finding Your Roots” — we’re all immigrants. Black people came here — not willingly, of course. They came in slave ships. But they came from someplace else. Even the Native Americans came from someplace else about 16,000 years ago. So everybody who showed up on this continent is from someplace else. And under the skin, we are almost identical genetically. And that is the strongest argument for brotherhood, sisterhood and the unity of the human species. And I make it every week over and over with “Finding Your Roots.”
Strom Thurmond, senator from South Carolina, who gave the longest filibuster speech against the 1957 Civil Rights Act, and was a life-long segregationist, also fathered a Black daughter. When this was revealed in 2003, Jesse Jackson commented upon the similarities between Thurmond and Jefferson, saying,
“By day, they are bullies,… By night, they manipulate race to their advantage.
The point that strikes me the most is that he lived 100 years and never acknowledged his daughter. He never let her eat at his table. He fought for laws that kept his daughter segregated and in an inferior position. He never fought to give her first-class status. Thomas Jefferson did pretty much the same.”
Power of Literature and “desegregating literature”
There is an overwhelming list of literature cited in Kendi/ Reynolds’ book, and it speaks to the extraordinary power of art and activism, even when it is problematic (like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Stamped also speaks to the power of the press, like William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator and W.E.B. DuBois’ newspaper The Crisis. But what should stand out most are the sheer number of books by Blacks: Frederick Douglas’ The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Dougass, An American Slave (1845); The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850); W.E.B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903); Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery (1901); and then all the phenomenal writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, to name just a few. But it doesn’t stop there by a long shot: James Baldwin’s huge body of work (please, please watch I Am Not Your Negro); George Jackson’s letters from prison, Soledad Brother; Black Panthers Huey P. Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide and Bobby Seale’s Seize The Day; the extensive feminist theory of Angela Davis; and the literature of Black feminist artists like Audre Lorde, Ntozke Shange, Alice Walker, Michele Wallace and bell hooks. This feminist literary line continues to Kimberle Williams Crenshaw who introduced the idea of intersectionality and onward to the Black Lives Matter movement, spearheaded by Black women, many of whom are also queer. I am inherently convinced of the absolute need to “desegregate literature” — a wonderful term I just heard used in a New York Times lecture on James Baldwin by the novelist Ayana Mathis. I take that to mean the need to fully integrate the canon, which for far too many years has been predominantly white, male, and European. I think one of the greatest powers of Stamped is that it points us in this direction.
W.E.B. Du Bois and the act of becoming
There is so much more to be gleaned from Kendi’s and Reynold’s collaborative book, perhaps most especially the precise way in which they trace W.E.B. Du Bois’ arc from assimilationist to antiracist, which cannot help but make one also think of the complex trajectories of Malcolm X (described by Kendi as an “ideological transformation from assimilationist to antiwhite separatist to antiracist”) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (see, for example, Peniel E. Joseph’s recently published The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the new biography of Malcolm X by Les Payne, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X). King himself paid tribute to the phenomenon of Du Bois’ path in a 1968 speech on the 100th anniversary of his birth. It is a powerful and radical speech, and well worth reading in its entirety. Here are just a few excerpts:
“His [Du Bois’] dedication to freedom drove him on as relentlessly in his seventies as it did in his twenties. He had already encompassed three careers. Beginning as a pioneer sociologist he had become an activist to further mass organization. The activist had then transformed himself into a historian. By the middle of the twentieth century when imperialism and war arose once more to imperil humanity he became a peace leader…
He symbolized in his being his pride in the black man. He did not apologize for being black and because of it, handicapped. Instead he attacked the oppressor for the crime of stunting black men. He confronted the establishment as a model of militant manhood and integrity. He defied them and though they heaped venom and scorn on him his powerful voice was never stilled.
And yet, with all his pride and spirit he did not make a mystique out of blackness. He was proud of his people, not because their color endowed them with some vague greatness but because their concrete achievements in struggle had advanced humanity and he saw and loved progressive humanity in all its hues, black, white, yellow, red, and brown. . .
In closing it would be well to remind white America of its debt to Dr. Du Bois. When they corrupted Negro history they distorted American history because Negroes are too big a part of the building of this nation to be written out of it without destroying scientific history. White America, drenched with lies about Negroes, has lived too long in a fog of ignorance. Dr. Du Bois gave them a gift of truth for which they should eternally be indebted to him.”
I think the primary reason for the predominance of the Du Bois arc guiding the narrative lies in the underlying philosophy of both Stamped and How to Be an Antiracist that we are all always in the process of becoming (salute to Michelle Obama) and that being an antiracist is ongoing (and daily).
I want to conclude my (lengthy!) comments by reiterating Kendi’s and Reynold’s final definition of an antiracist as “ someone who truly loves.”
As the Black feminist Audre Lorde wrote in All About Love: New Visions, we must also then begin thinking of “ love as an action rather than a feeling.”
Originally published at https://goodtroubleforkids.substack.com.
