Ibram X. Kendi

Weeks after passing the most antiracist bill of the decade over Reagan’s veto—the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act with its strict economic sanctions—Congress passed the most racist bill of the decade. On October 27, 1986, Reagan, “with great pleasure,” signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, supported by both Republicans and Democrats.

Ibram X. Kendi in Stamped From the Beginning

One of the scientists responsible for sequencing the human genome, Craig Venter, was even more frank with reporters. “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis,” Venter said. His research team at Celera Genomics had determined “the genetic code” of five individuals, who were identified as either “Hispanic, Asian, Caucasian or African American,” and the scientists could not tell one race from another.

Ibram X. Kendi in Stamped From the Beginning

Cosby envisioned the ultimate uplift suasion show about a stereotype-defying family uplifted by their own striving beyond the confines of discriminated Blackness. He believed he was showing African Americans what was possible if they worked hard enough and stopped their antiracist activism. Cosby and his millions of loyal viewers actually believed that The Cosby Show and its spinoffs were persuading away the racist ideas of its millions of White viewers.

Ibram X. Kendi in Stamped From the Beginning

The percentage of children born to single Black women had risen from 21 percent in 1960 to 55 percent in 1985, Davis said. Black teenager birthrates could not explain this increase (those figures had remained virtually unchanged from 1920 to 1990). Davis explained that the “disproportionate number of births to unmarried teenagers” had been caused by the fact that older, married Black women had started having fewer children in the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, it was the overall percentage of babies born to young and single Black mothers as opposed to married mothers—not the sheer number of babies born to single Black mothers—that dramatically rose.

Ibram X. Kendi in Stamped From the Beginning

One study, for example, based on the National Longitudinal Youth Survey data collected from 1976 to 1989, found that young Black males were far more likely than young White males to engage in serious violent crime. But when the researchers compared only employed young males, the racial differences in violent behavior disappeared. Certain violent crime rates were higher in Black neighborhoods simply because unemployed people were concentrated in Black neighborhoods.

Ibram X. Kendi in Stamped From the Beginning

In 1996, when two-thirds of the crack users were White or Latina/o, 84.5 percent of the defendants convicted of crack possession were Black.

Ibram X. Kendi in Stamped From the Beginning