I'm going to be unfair. Stamped from the Beginning is a perfectly fine survey of antiblack white supremacy. It's not in depth, detailed, or heavy on theory. It might well be the ideal book for someone just getting into the subject. If you meet that description, go get it and read away. It's as thorough as one can hope for a book trying to cover centuries in a go and still be readable by people who aren't immersed in the literature. It has a few important insights and raises challenging questions that go against the grain of accepted pop culture wisdom. That's everything it should be.

I don't like it. I am not Kendi's audience at all and that's ok. Nothing wrong with writing for general audiences; it's what we do here. I also read him shortly after Winthrop Jordan, which makes Kendi's whirlwind tour of the high points look more simplistic than it is. But there are issues. He almost completely ignores racism against any non-white minority except African-Americans, which would be fine if he hadn't chosen to call his book a definitive history of racist ideas in America. Talked about this last week, so I'll not rehash it but that is a significant shortcoming.

The more glaring issue to me is that Kendi outright misses and appears to misunderstand things that are in my wheelhouse. The most obvious of these is the 3/5 Compromise:

Equating enslaved Blacks to three-fifths of all other (White) persons matched the ideology of racists on both sides of the aisle. Both assimilationists and segregationists argued, yet with different premises and conclusions, that Black people were simultaneously human and subhuman. Assimilationists stridently declared the capability of sub-White, sub-human Blacks to become whole, five-fifths, White, one day. For segregationists, three-fifths offered a mathematical approximation of inherent and permanent Black inferiority. They may have disagreed on the rationale and the question of permanence, but seemingly all embraced Black inferiority—and in the process enshrined the power of slaveholders and racist ideas in the nation’s founding document.

Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 116). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition.

Except in the most narrow, technical sense, that is not what the compromise does. The issue is a debate over the worth of enslaved lives, but it's specifically one over whether their enslavers should be allowed to profit politically from enslaving other human beings. The position of the enslavers was that they should. The position of those adverse to slavery was that they should get nothing of the kind. It's an argument over whether slavery is a legitimate source of power over whites more than it is one about the nature of blacks. There are a lot of ways Kendi could have gone with that debate and I'd have liked to see them, but it comes and goes in that one paragraph. Nor does he cite recent works which dig into it for the contours and nuances of white opinion vis-a-vis slavery and blackness. It's a glaring missed opportunity for analysis that gets tossed at the wall more like a superfluous example than a substantive comment, which leaves the reader with no more understanding of the issue than they began with.

And that's the good part about it. Because Kendi breezes through so quickly, you don't even know who the players really are. Attitudes toward slavery are not the same as attitudes toward black people, but they do have some correlations. Since the enslavers asked 5/5 representation, Kendi casts them as more pro-black -if still wildly racist- than the people who who accepted 3/5 (everyone at the convention, in the end) and completely omits the party who argued for 0/5 because slavery was wrong and should not be a source of national power. They did that to protect white rights, most importantly, but 0/5 is also an antiracist position in just the sense that Kendi argues for other antiracist positions. It acknowledges that there is a power to whiteness, here exercised through slavery, and sought to eliminate it. Given that elsewhere, Kendi is keen to look at the interplay of racist and antiracist ideas in the same minds, I just don't understand how he missed the chance here unless he doesn't know the scholarship at all.

I don't know if I'm more disappointed or disturbed on the point. Either way, it's enough of a mistake that I'm much less confident when he gets into history I have less familiarity with. The sections that largely follow WEB DuBois' and Angela Davis' lives seem like they're full of great stuff. Kendi clearly has a lot more enthusiasm for them. I just don't know what I'm missing.

The other one is my hobbyhorse. Kendi is among those who think that rich svengalis convinced poor whites to ignore their own best interests by creating racism. The basic argument here is, as always, almost fine but that almost is where it all falls apart. We know that races are make-believe. We know that there are class issues in white society. We know that politicians demagogue about them, sometimes at variance with their own private beliefs. No one contests that. But the line is basically that poor whites are fooled because the deal offered them: psychological (and occasional material) wages are paid for whiteness while the rich guys make big bank.

It's a crap deal, from our POV. I see in Kendi's book no more willingness than I've seen elsewhere, which is almost perfectly zero, to consider what it says that poor whites have so often willingly taken the crap deal. It's an impoverished imagination that can't follow through and consider that they might not have precisely the values of the scholar and instead do think white supremacy in their best interests. We don't normally explain white behavior this way. Ordinary whites have agency right up until they do something inconvenient. Then they're all dupes, against whom we adopt some weird colonialist perspective instead of considering that by their lights, it might actually be the better option than interracial, class-based solidarity. Essentially, because we believe white supremacy a moral horror and factually incorrect, too many of us are unwilling to see or accept that ordinary people can choose it with eyes open and, from their POV, be right to do so. They are under no obligation to act as our value structures dictate and not obviously mistaken or misled when they fail to do so, which is an insight I think so damned basic I can't imagine how it eludes anyone. It's Understanding the Past 101: people in the past are not alien freaks, but they also aren't our contemporaries; they have different values and worldviews.

I know that's a dark place; it's not a conclusion I've come to lightly. But scholars of white supremacy are supposed to ask us to confront hard truths that go against the celebratory grain of pop culture understandings of American history. Kendi himself points to the narrative of racial progress as a frequent obstacle to actual antiracism, a true but hard insight. His idea of racist progress maps very well to what I've come to think about white supremacy. Yet he drops the ball completely. Unless it's coming up in the two chapters I've got left, he doesn't seem to even acknowledge the possibility that poor whites were acting correctly, per their own lights, in adopting white supremacy.

I can't explain it, except to posit that Kendi has some a priori convictions about material concerns being obviously objective and ultimate, as well as substantively identical across two centuries. If so, he's as entitled to his worldview as anybody but it's left this weird blind spot.

I've been doing research on the Battle of Hastings so I can make a good reply to this question. Part of this has involved reading the extant contemporary sources - translated by Stephen Morillo and packaged with essays on different aspects of the campaign and battle in The Battle of Hastings: Sources and Interpretations. I've also hunted down translations of Wace and Orderic Vitalis, and gone hunting about in various secondary sources for information relevant to the question.

So far, I've learned three very fascinating things:

1. The Fyrd are depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry as using finned javelins. Two of them hold the finned javelins, while a third is sticking out of a fallen Norman. I've never heard any suggestion of this kind of javelin being used by the Anglo-Saxons, and the thegns don't use them, but they're there in the Tapestry nonetheless. I'm not sure what the significance of that is, just yet.

2. The motte of the castle at Hastings was made from sand, and there are no traces of timber. Whatever is shown in the castle building scene of the Bayeux Tapestry, it either wasn't built where Hastings castle is now, or something else strange is going on. Robert Higham and Philip Barker also don't believe that what is shown at the top of the motte in the Tapestry is a depiction of a keep. They don't know what it's meant to represent.

3. According to Wace, the Anglo-Saxons did indeed carry their axes slung across their backs, which /u/hborrgg speculated might have been the case a month or so ago.

I have begun reading Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica edited by Laura E. Matthew and Michel R. Oudijk. I am almost two chapters in and I absolutely love this book so far. If you enjoyed reading Matthew Restall's book Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest I think you will really enjoy this, too. I'll provide a full review when I finish the book.

This might be too broad a request, but are there any good book recommendations on Cold War-era espionage? I'm looking for anything from nitty gritty operational stuff to the 30,000-foot view, preferably more accessible and "pop" than scholarly.

Just posted a seperate thread before seeing this one - I'm looking for background info on the 'declaration of the immediate causes which induce and justify the secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union,' from the Mississippi State Convention of 1861

Not looking for anything extensive, just a good source that has info on the author(s), signatories, and some general context.

You guys are great, thanks!

Are there any good books on the Jewish Labour Bund in Poland; particularly one which looks at it in comparison to social democracy, Bolshevism, and Zionism? Additionally, any good primary sources or readers translated into German or English?