Kendi begins his text with an overview of the “historical moment” in which he writes (1). He summarizes recent events occurring as he writes, citing statistics on differential police violence and income inequality between white and black populations in America. These disparities are “no surprise” to most (1), he writes, as “racial parity” is “older than the life of the United States” (2). He separates approaches to this racial disparity into three camps: the “segregationists,” who blame Black people; “antiracists,” who blame racial discrimination; and “assimilationists,” who, Kendi writes, believe the cause of racial disparity is a mix of both (2).

The title of the text, Kendi writes, comes from a speech Jefferson Davis made in the Senate in 1860. The speech declared that a bill that would fund black education “was based on the false notion of racial equality,” and that inequality between the races “was ‘stamped from the beginning’” (3). Pointing to assimilationists’ tendencies to hope to erase the “Black skin” that is “an ugly stamp on the beautiful White canvas,” Kendi outlines practices of whitewashing as the means of acceptance in America (3). In contrast to these segregationist and assimilationist practices, antiracist thought is built on the pretense that “[b]lacks and whites are on the same level, are equal in all their divergences” (4).