Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won this year’s National Book Award for nonfiction, is an altogether remarkable thesis on history, but, in ways that are both moving and immediately painful, it also reverberates with the post-election autopsy we’re all conducting right now. Kendi is reading Thursday, December 1, at University Book Store.
Donald Trump just hired a neo-Nazi, Jim Crow Paleo-conservative as his right-hand man, and he’s stuffing his staff with a slew of violent nativists. Meanwhile, countless numbers of white liberals are venting their spleen with theories that the left will gain traction when all the outsiders pipe down about “identity politics” (I’m looking at you, Mark Lilla) and plead their humanity, pre-civil-rights style, to the masses who elected a monster (I’m looking at you, Jonathan Pie).