Review

Stamped is "Not a history book. This is a book about the here and now. A book about race"

When I first got this book, I didn't understand what these words meant, a history book, but not history book? Maybe it was one of those sayings that for example fantasy books use, where they give a quote from someone saying how quirky the book is, but in the end it's just the same as all the rest (Sorry, don't like fantasy a lot.)

But now that I've finished this book, I am able to understand what this means. It is weird to explain without you reading it, but this book takes you into the history of American Racism starting from the first recorded Racist to today, and instead of just putting a date and moving on like other history books, it creates each thing that happened in history as a whole story, each moment being connected with one another, while the people fight for equality. That is pretty much a description for this book, a history book putting the pieces together and making it a connected story, there is no other way for me to explain it, and the only way to understand me, is by reading the book itself as I said. In rating the book from 1-5, this book truly deserves a 5, for his excellency on fluent writting, the hard topic it talks about, and for the meaning at the end of it, where we decide ourselves if we want to be racist, assimilationist or antiracist.

Stamped starts by giving us a quick introduction on the writer of the original book Stamped from the beginning, written by Ibram X. Kendi, and how we writes to teach others, then we learn about the person who remixed Stamped from the beginning to make this book, Jason Reynolds, and we talk about the race problems we face today. Finally after the introduction, we cover the story of the first recorded racist, Prince Henry and his supporter, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, funny enough an African. These two made slavery a normal thing, and influenced slavery to continue by the time the first 13 colonies started. The puritan power starts to grow in the 13 colonies and were coming out with their own rules for the religion, and obviously, they were racists, agreeing that any being who were a different color or were not puritans, were below them and should in fact get punished by god and thus, black people being enslaved grew more popular because "god was ok with it."

But black people, of course, were not ok with it and waned to fight for freedom, this lead into the Civil War, where if you fought, you were free from all slavery, a free soul from the whites, or so they though. By the end of the war, yes slavery was illegal, but segregation wasn't. Blacks were recognized by everyone as a minority, and too dumb to take care of their own life and should be "Helped" (Enslaved) by whites who were smarter, wait for it, because whites have a bigger skull.

Once more, the black community was forced into fight for freedom, leading to great minds like Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Martin Luther king Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois, William Lloyd Garrison, and many others to join the fight. And as time passed, things seemed to get better and better for the Black community, kids were able to go to the same school no matter their race, people learned more about the Black history, and people were able to finally see everyone as an equal. This was pushed even more when Barack Obama became president, proving that yes, Black people could do the same thing a white person can do, and even perhaps archive more.

The book finally ends with today, police brutality has been a big topic which just proves that Racism still exists today, and not only to Blacks but to many other races too.

I Am not sure if you noticed what the real message given here is, but this book shows us the bad things racism can do, how many minorities are hurt and humiliated because of something they can change, people with a different color are people, people who want a normal life, and to have the same rights as you and me. It's been 200 or more years since the beginning of this country, yet we are still doing the same mistakes that were committed years ago, yes, maybe there is much more equality than before, but this still shouldn't be an argument to stop fighting for total equality, specially in the "Land of the free."

This is something we should all know when choosing how we want to treat others, if we want to hate or love, to create a bad world or a world with peace. This is a beautiful message, and that really impacted me to, when I grow up, I want to be able to help others and give the rights to those who are still considered a not equal in the eyes of white racists or even the government itself, and this book has just given me more confidence into following that path more.

I've talked about the writing a lot (Maybe so much to the point of suffocating you) but I love it, sorry. I am never bored at any point of the book, and nothing ever feels out of place with this book. It's so fluent, I even never notice when there is a time skip, or when there a new topic is rising. I am able to feel the author tone in the writting, for example when people were trying to explain how slavery was ok, I could feel the author just rolling their eyes or even laughing about how stupid it sounds, and even I felt those emotions my self, I would laugh about these dumb assumptions to the point that my parents were a bit concerned when I laughed out of nowhere (I think they thought this was a comedy book.)

As I said, I was able to understand this book, it didn't use big words nor anything like that, and when it did, it would give a quick definition for them, I am ok at reading really hard books, but this was a very strait forward book, so easy that I believe people even younger than myself could read, which is also very good thing.

Now I want to add one last thing before I continue, I though it was hilarious how the author took a whole chapter just to write "Africans are not savages" in chapter 7 and then continue with the story, that was really unexpected.

In conclusion, this book is great at everything, it explains the story of racism and how it affected everyone through history, no matter the color. It was really easy to understand and very fluently in everyway possible, and the book also has a great message which at least I loved. This is why it deserves a 5/5, and has my recommendation to you. Why would you read it? well there are many options as to why you would read this book, but I recommend it for you because it is a great way to learn about American history and be able to understand the problems we struggle today, history is important to learn so in the future, mistakes like in the past will not happen again. You will learn the stories of many people who were criticized but never gave up, giving you also more confidence for what you want to do. This book is also a great example of how a good book looks like, and how just a simple book can affect and teach others.