Stamped from the Beginning: A Graphic History of Racist Ideas in America

by Ibram X. Kendi, Joel Christian Gill (Adaptor/Illustrator)

A striking graphic novel edition of the National Book Award-winning history of how racist ideas have shaped American life—from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist.

Racism has persisted throughout history—but so have antiracist efforts to dismantle it. Through deep research and a gripping narrative that illuminates the lives of five key American figures, preeminent historian Ibram X. Kendi reveals how understanding and improving the world cannot happen without identifying and facing the racist forces that shape it.

In collaboration with award-winning historian and comic artist Joel Christian Gill, this stunningly illustrated graphic-novel adaptation of Dr. Kendi’s groundbreaking Stamped from the Beginning explores, with vivid clarity and dimensionality, the living history of America, and how we can learn from the past to work toward a more equitable, antiracist future.

Genres: Graphic Novels, History, Nonfiction, Politics, Historical, Race, Comics

288 pages, Hardcover

First published June 6, 2023

About the author

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, and the founding director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News racial justice contributor. He is the host of the new action podcast, Be Antiracist.

Dr. Kendi is the author of many highly acclaimed books including Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, making him the youngest ever winner of that award. He had also produced five straight #1 New York Times bestsellers, including How to Be an Antiracist, Antiracist Baby, and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, co-authored by Jason Reynolds. In 2020, Time magazine named Dr. Kendi one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He was awarded a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the Genius Grant.

Reviews

[Traci Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my third verison of the Stamped books (the original, the YA) and I think it fits nicely in the Kendi universe. The illustrations are really great, and there are a lot of clever jokes. I think some of the history gets lost trying to squeeze some dense material into graphic form. I think the overall idea comes through but not as smoothly or detailed as I would've liked in sections.

[Kendra · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an important book, and a lot of people need to read it, but I quite honestly found it hard to parse. The lettering is crowded and cramped, the panels don't flow particularly well, and there is so. much. text. It doesn't feel like it was born as a graphic book, but rather was a text-only book being shoehorned into a graphic format. It just doesn't work well. The text needs space, and there needs to be less of it.

[Phyllis | Mocha Drop · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow - I’m REALLY impressed!! This abridged offering (about 70 pages) is packed with facts surrounding the founding of American views on racism and all is spawned (slavery, disenfranchisement, etc). It outlines the actors, schools of thought, and the political and economic climates of the times to help the reader piece together the makings of America and the systems that oppressed so many for so long.

The graphic format does not diminish the offering – great for the young and old, and everyone in between. Bravo on the structure/layout, content, and delivery of some difficult and complex topics. It clearly illustrates how racist thoughts and theories were propagated in multiple institutions - collegiate, religious, and legal - and how greed/profit ensured its perpetuity and continued evolution to even deeper deplorable levels.

I pre-ordered copies of the final so I can complete the offering and retain it on my personal shelf as well as gift to middle-grade relatives.

Thanks to Ten Speed Press and NetGalley for an opportunity to review.

[Courtney Hatch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like many, I’ve spent some significant time with Kendi over the last 5 years, and I LOVE a graphic history, so I was eager to pick this up. Unfortunately, the experience was pretty disappointing.

I still am wrestling over who the intended audience is here. It is very text heavy with vocabulary and references that would be over the average high schoolers head, but it also uses a lot of Generation Alpha slang with historical figures saying things like “this is very sus.” There are many wink wink moments to people who will get snarky references to political soundbites of the 2020s, but there’s a whole level of background reading you’d need to enter the text with in order to catch those. So basically, this feels like a visual companion text to those who have already read Kendi’s work/are up to date on current politics/have a girthy background knowledge of history and politics already and can also translate some gen alpha slang. Basically, it feels like it was written for this moment alone and will not age well.

I approached the text thinking it would be geared toward a YA audience, but besides adding image support, there was nothing else done to make the material more accessible. I’ve taught Dubois to teenagers, and it is a tough text to tackle for that age group. Putting the same text in a speech bubble next to a picture of Dubois doesn’t do much to increase its accessibility.

There is also a narrow line here that Kendi is walking between applying his lens of categorizing all historical figures and statements as either antiracists, segregationists, or assimilationists and engaging in presentism. This doesn’t feel like a glaring issue in his written work, but serving the same material as a graphic summary suddenly essentializes everything.

I thought the use of different colored speech bubbles was a clever visual indicator of when someone was saying something racist (a black speech bubble and white lettering), narration (a white speech bubble with black lettering), or a quote (a gray speech bubble). There are two issues with this though—at first I thought the gray speech bubbles were used to signify direct quotes from a source but then I realized there was no way to distinguish a direct quote from a summary or a fictionalized response from that character (this became obvious when Frederick Douglass was quoted saying, “WTF”). Like I explained previously, for those versed in American history it is fairly easy to distinguish which are actual quotes and which aren’t (though I did have to look up some because I wasn’t sure, and I have literally been professionally trained in this). For a high schooler, they’re going to struggle knowing what is primary source and what isn’t. Because there is no bibliography, references, or citation of any kind in the entire book, there is no way to guide readers toward more engagement with sources. Surely there could be a clever way to integrate some footnotes (& what an awesome way to expose new scholars to the power of footnotes/sources etc). I also felt like the automatic visual categorizing of quotes as either antiracist or racist took away a step for younger readers that I think is necessary in teaching critical thinking.

TLDR; this feels like nobody consulted a specialist in education or YA literature & it would’ve been more effective to do a graphic adaption of Jason Reynold’s version (IF that is their intended audience which I still am not sure of haha)

[Kawai]

I like my historical graphic novels laced with snark (ex: "Strong burn, master. Do you want some cream?").

[Jenn Marshall · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has so much information it gives you history in easy to understand ways. The book is not an easy read emotionally so to make it an easy read physically will really help it get into the hands of kids. Which is important. I cannot wait to see the final project.

4 stars

[Alice Jiang · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked the graphic themes that were woven throughout the telling of racist/antiracist history (like kkk symbols even in more modern day stuff). I do feel like because it goes through so many years of history, there were parts that felt rushed, and I wanted a little bit more at the end about obama and how that created the false sense of "post-racial" america

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

summer 2025 reading challenge - read about book about something you’d like to learn more about

[Dakota Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stamped from the Beginning is probably a better read in its original form. The insertion of commentator characters only serves to diffuse the important history being laid out. It also makes it hard to discern when the author is presenting an actual quote from a historical character versus when the character's original words have been satirically adjusted for effect.

The history is fascinating, if dense. "Graphic" history usually means the words have been pared down - not the case here. If anything it seems like there are more words. And the fact that this is a history of racist ideas in America should not be forgotten as you're reading. It's true that after a while, the mind thinks "okay, did anyone ever do anything good in America?" But that's not what this book is showing - it's revealing historical and modern America's poor understanding of racial issues so that we can begin the process of addressing those issues. "The more you know..."

All that said, it's a weird read, even if you do (mostly) understand what the authors are attempting. As history progresses, it becomes a bit of a whack-a-mole game. That was racist and that was racist and, oh yeah, that was also racist. But wait, that was antiracist! If your goal is discern "what is racist vs. antiracist," this isn't the book for you. (Hopefully that wasn't the goal of the authors.)

Lots of complaints above, I guess, but Stamped from the Beginning is still an important, interesting read. I'd recommend tackling the original product, though, not this graphic version.

[Peacegal · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books that I would suggest to just about everyone--especially those who still cling to the old notions of "comics" as having no educational or literary value.

STAMPED takes an unvarnished look at American history and asks tough questions of its readers, yet it does so, incredibly, with a genuinely funny sense of humor. (The section on the Salem witch trials, for example, depicts a Puritan girl confounding her father with strange chants of "Wu-Tang is for the children!") The author's depiction of American societal racism as a Rube Goldberg machine in which every gain provokes a prejudiced backlash is genius.

Thought-provoking and important, this one will have readers looking at a variety of topics with new eyes.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing and beautifully illustrated version of Ibrahim X. Kendi’s books Stamped from the Beginning. I have read the adult Stamped, the YA Stamped, and now this version. It illustrates Kendi’s ideas brilliantly and with a focus on specific people from history such as W.E.B. DuBois and Angela Davis. All classrooms should have a copy of this book.

[Rowan Pelfrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked learning about anti-racism and the format was great. There were a lot of takeaways from this that are incredibly valuable and honestly should be read by a lot of people who probably wouldn't read it.

[Natalie S · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this, but it was so dry. I had a hard time staying awake let alone understanding all the historical figures and the message that they were trying to get through. If it was done at a slower pace in multiple volumes it might have been better.

[Kathie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone should read this book!

[Maryann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved the content and history, but the art and formatting was distracting and disappointing to me. I plan to read the non-graphic version.

[Jessica Nish · Rating 5 out of 5]

I rarely give long reviews, but I will for this book. This has been one of the best graphic novel adaptations I have read. Especially one of the best history graphic novel adaptations. There were a lot of lessons I pulled away from this experience.

1. Assimilation is on the opposite side of the racism coin as segregation. I think all growing up I would see people who were acting out in segregationist ways as evil doers. But especially with this book, I’m now seeing that racism. Looks like a lot of different things and can be especially harmful with assimilationist attitudes. I look back on my life and recognized different points when I was expecting Black people to “fall in line” when in reality, I was forcing my assimilation belief system onto these people.

2. History is complicated and replicates itself over and over again. No wonder this book has been banned so many times, people like Donald Trump would hate for the masses to truly understand that history doesn’t look like a series of only evil or only good people. History looks like a wide variety of human beings within or outside of a movement (depending on the day) that have contributed harm or good. It was interesting to see how even somebody like WEB Du Bois and Booker T. Washington contributed in negative ways to their community through their written works. It can be simultaneously true as well that people can do good things and bad things. I look to Abraham Lincoln as this example from the book. Abraham Lincoln wanted to be anti-slavery but was also anti-Black.

3. Racism doesn’t go away, it just evolves. Just like many people in 2008 I thought that racism had died but in reality it just shifted and changed. Now we’re at a point in 2025 where we are in a very different society than we were in 2008 but in some ways we’re still dealing with the same things that our ancestors all the way back in 1700 we’re dealing with.

4. I will never ever again believe anyone that tells me that humans were simply a “product of their time”. I know this to be false now. There are plenty of accounts of abolitionists and antiracists throughout the entirety of American history. They may not have been large in number, but they did exist, and through their efforts they were able to propel the anti-racism movement forward, even if it was only by a few centimeters at a time.

5. I would challenge any conservative who holds MAGA ideology to their hearts to read this book and still hold onto their belief systems that they were indoctrinated with. In a season that is especially rot with fear and intimidation, it’s up to us to keep reading books that speak truth so we can understand the falseness of hate.

[Miss Ryoko · Rating 5 out of 5]

While it took me a very long time to read this graphic, it wasn't because it was bad. I have not read Dr. Kendi's book Stamped from the Beginning because it's quite a hefty book. So I was really excited to see a graphic novel version cpme out... but it, too, is quite hefty. Nonetheless, it was really, really good (despite me taking my sweet time to read it). The illustrations were fun, Joel used some humor among all the serious storytelling, and I found it really insightful and engaging.

I hope to see books like this as required reading in schools some day very soon. Forget The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, and Great Expectations. We need to be reading books like Stamped from the Beginning and Tears We Cannot Stop (by Michael Eric Dyson). Thank you to Joel Christian Gill for bringing this work to life in comics. I really enjoyed it and I hope others will take the time to read this history, whether it's through the written book or the graphic novel.

[Jai · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stamped from the beginning was a visually appealing book. It was a huge book with only 278 pages but I found myself trying to look at every inch of the page to read the text and see the illustrations. I also caught a few funny things in the text that the author snuck in that had me cracking up.
There were things that I learned and things that I knew about but gained more insight on( Reagan’s presidency and his racist views and policies)

One thing I will say about my people as a whole is that even though we were stamped from the beginning after we were stolen from Africa no matter what was thrown at us we thrived. Slavery, lynchings, rape, families being taken from us etc. We’re still here as a people. Are we perfect? Nope but we as a race just like any other race isn’t a monolith.
I never knew so many Black men tried to assimilate and blame other black folks for the issues that white racists started. But I’m proud of all the people that stood their ground and fought for us.

[Bryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kendi presents a narrative of United States history from an anti-racist perspective. I find it super interesting to read things from Kendi's perspective. Kendi raises the bar from not being racist to actively being anti-racist. There is so much institutional and historical baggage that comes along with our society that Kendi advocates being actively anti-racist. I love to expand my circle of thought by reading things that are outside of my day-to-day experience. I enjoyed the graphic format of the story telling. Kendi's book is an interesting read.

[Claudia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This graphic novel packed so much history and important info while still managing to be easily digestible. Obviously, there were a lot of upsetting things that were included. The story wouldn't be complete without also going over the horrors of the past (and today). I liked the occasional humor that was used. Yes, there was a lot of text but that's to be expected given the subject. Overall an excellent read.

I encourage everyone to read this book. Just know there are different versions (a remixed one, the original, one for kids, audiobooks). I understand that a graphic novel might not be for everyone. I love that there are options for people to pick from.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want this to be a textbook for a high school history class that I get to teach. What amazing information and perspectives and mind blowing stuff that we should ALL KNOW.

[Julia Pika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great content, but strange formatting in places.

[Alexandria Ganger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Engaging, informative, and brilliantly done. This is an excellent graphic adaptation. Can't recommend it enough

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommend.

[Carrie Brown]

“All men are created equal, but some restrictions may apply”

In this graphic interpretation of Ibram X Kendi’s Stamped From The Beginning, Gill illustrates the impact of racism and take a look at it throughout history. This version of the book could easily be a favorite of young reader due to its accessibility and ease of reading.

[Sarah Krajewski · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the graphic novel edition of Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, and it will teach a whole new group of readers all about the racism woven into America’s history, as well as the antiracist efforts to stop it. I read the original, so the content was the same, but the graphics added so much more. Gill’s impressive artwork paints the picture America needs to see and reckon with.

[Carly Griffith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book!! It takes historical issues and uses contemporary techniques and references to make the history of racism in the US digestible. I laughed, I cried, I felt hopeful for the future and I think this is a book everyone should read. It gives context to literally everything and I genuinely learned so much. 100% recommend

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this graphic rendering by Joel Christian Gill is just as important as Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning. Essential reading for every American. Incredibly well organized and well told.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stamp from the beginning, has been a very important book in our modern society. So important that they made both a young readers addition, and a kid’s edition. Now they have come out with a graphic novel edition to help all readers, understand how racism began at the same time our country did. How from the very beginning of colonialization, the thinking of one race of people is better than other, has been stamped into everything that our country has grown up around. This book does this through looking at five key historical figures, and what they have done to burden or to help society as a whole in this endeavor to be anti-racist. The way this book was turned into a graphic novel is phenomenal. How the artist and the author bring forth the idea of antiracist versus segregationist and that both are a form of racism, had this white reader thinking “maybe I am doing things wrong”. This book starts out with a fantastic comic of a white woman going into a black school to teach all the kids, and now they’ve all passed. And how it’s a good thing. A.k.a. the Dangerous Minds situation also known as white saviorism. It helps people realize that this is a form of assimilation. That by saying things like stop, pull your pants, talk right, etc. is assimilation. What is talking right? Too many it’s talking “white”. So, lots of fantastic ideas and history in this book that is not taught other places. Whether read in graphic novel, or any of the three other versions, this book should be read, and should be considered part of a curriculum on the history of our country.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

#netgalleyarc Yes, yes, and more yes,! I love that so many nonfiction books are being converted into graphic novels and this one was awesome. Such important topics are covered and are made all the more accessible with this book. Will definitely be ordering multiple copies for my HS library.