To state that your book is
definitive of any subject is a statement that is hard to claim. For Ibram X.
Kendi, the claim is true if you thinking of a work that reviews the literature
of racism and contour work over four centuries. The book is definitive mostly
concerning the ideas of race, and in particularly towards the black Americans.
The subtitle of the book is ‘The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in
America’. The way the author constructs his work is through defining the most
important individuals of their time that dealt with issue of race. The author
identifies the works of these individuals and also the works of others from the
same era to create a narrative of racism.
The book is a narrative of the five idealists
throughout the history America of whom for their age defined the question of
race. The book starts from the beginning of the British settlements and their
relation to race. The race question was not as imperative towards the people
that lived on the land before the emerging of the whites. The main reason is
because they did participate in the society of the whites. The question most
relied on the issue of the blacks whom were brought to the new lands as first Indentured
Servant and later as permanent slave. The author begins be construct how in the
beginning the idea of lifetime of servitude did not exist in the British
mindset. It needs to be impended into when the new servants were of different
color and background. The author points out the importance of demeaning the
blacks to a point that they were not consider even human.
The main subject of race in this book revolves
around the interaction between the whites and the blacks. The book does refer the
issues of race concerning the natives, the new comers from the non-Nordic
whites, and everyone in-between, but it does focus mostly focus on the racism
against the blacks. The truth of the matter is that a lot of literature that
has been published throughout the years mostly deals with this issue. The
natives were not part of the society of the whites since they were part of
their tribes. The new comers from Europe of inferior race did concern the
whites that of English and Germanic when they first arrived but it did not hunt
them for a long time.
The
book shows that intellects of the society helped make it acceptable to demean
the black. The most important that people needed was justification of their actions.
As one group humanize Black American, another worked to either justify their
cruelty against them. The treatment of Black American was always troublesome
since the beginning. The question of acceptance of one façade of their humanity
led to another question of their demeanor of their acceptance.
At one point in reading this book,
I was thinking about buying all of the works that were mentioned in the book,
but after thinking about it for a while. I might have some strong intellectual
books that are great works of the nation, but in the same time, I am going to
have a very racial selection books the demeaning the humanity in general.
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