Justin Suran

Stamped is a political manual, instructing by historical example. Starting with the Puritans and ending with #BlackLivesMatter, Stamped analyzes US history by sorting Black and White “assimilationists” (whom the book calls “racists”) from bona fide “antiracists.” Stamped is particularly contemptuous of Black people who embraced or adapted pragmatically to America’s mainstream culture and institutions: “assimilationism,” the book argues, is both cowardly and racist. Stamped gives credit to the boxer Jack Johnson for “[breaking] the backs of White people” but jabs at the NAACP for being “an organization of ‘refined’ folks . . . whose mission was to go before courts and politicians to persuade White judges and legislators to end racial discrimination.” Elsewhere, Stamped writes off W.E.B. Du Bois’s academic career as “keeping up with White people.” (The Marxist intellectual Angela Davis— one of the book’s exemplary antiracists— gets a pass in spite of her studies at the Sorbonne and the University of Frankfurt.) Similarly, Barack Obama comes off as a huge disappointment, someone who “always seemed to assimilate under pressure.” On occasion critical of the Black community (e.g. when he urged Black people to take more responsibility for their own destinies), Obama failed to live up to the book’s antiracist ideal despite “flashes—true moments—of antiracist thought.” Instead, “Obama fell in line with the [assimilationist] likes of Lincoln, Du Bois, [Booker T.] Washington, [Frederick] Douglass, and many others.” It’s worth noting that one of the book’s exemplary antiracists is the Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who advocated voluntary separation of the races and what he called racial “pride and purity.” For Garvey, social separation was necessary to achieve Black self-reliance and economic development. To that end, he worked to create a Black homeland in Africa to which Black people could return. Although Garvey gained many followers in the 1920s, other Black leaders saw his ideas as bizarre and counterproductive. Although the labels Black and White are used frequently in the book, Stamped offers little insight into the ubiquitous construct of “race.” Like the multiculturalists of the 1980s and 1990s, the new antiracists are at ease sorting individuals into color-coded groups and assigning those groups to race-specific cultures. But to paraphrase the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, we can simultaneously resist racism and the color-based identities exploited by racists. Stamped misses that opportunity. Like Garvey’s nationalist movement a hundred years ago, this book urges us to see the world as a collection of more or less distinct communities defined by color, fixed and self-evident, each striving to get ahead in what Garvey called “the great race for existence.”