Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You is the young reader's adaptation of Ibram X. Kendi's book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. This non-fiction book is divided up by five time periods in American history with the purpose of showing the reader how "racist ideas were started and spread, and how they can be discredited." In Chapter One, Reynolds and Kendi write, "Before we being, let's get something straight. This is not a history book. I repeat, this is not a history book. At least not like the ones you're used to reading in school...Instead, what this is, is a book that contains history. A history directly connected to our lives as we live them right his minute. This is a present book. A book about here and now. A book that hopefully will help us better understand why we are where are as Americans, specifically as a our identity pertains to race" (Kendi and Reynolds, 2020). They then go on to break down key events in history through this lens of race to better help people understand that the civil rights movement didn't just "fix" everything and we are not actually living in a post-racial society.
Stamped is a well-written, accessible, and honest book about race. But, because it address the issue of race head on, it ended up on ALA's Top Ten Banned Book list in 2020 for "Reasons: Banned and challenged because of author’s public statements, and because of claims that the book contains “selective storytelling incidents” and does not encompass racism against all people" (ALA, 2020). And Kendi and Reynolds don't beat around the bush with this fact either. In the first chapter, after introducing the premise of the book, they immediately talk about how the word race has become so problematic for people:
"Uh-oh. The R-word. Which for many of us still feels rated R. Or can be matched only with another R word -- run. But don't. Let's all just take a deep breath. Inhale. Hold it. Exhale and breath out. R-A-C-E. See? Not so bad. Except for the fact that race has been a strange and persistent poison in American history, which I'm sure you already know. I'm also sure that, depending on where you are and where you've grown up, your experiences with it - or at least the moment in which you recognize it - may vary" (Kendi and Reynolds, 2020).
It's ironic that the types of books we need about race, like this one, are the ones that are most often challenged and banned because they make people confront the realities of our history and current circumstances. This book does both in a way that engages young readers and offers them a different perspective than what they get in school textbooks, so that they can start to have an honest conversation with themselves about their own relationship and experiences with race so that they can then have the important conversations with others that we all need to be having right now.