“Waaaaaaaat?” When Jason Reynolds wants to explain to his young readers the background to racism in the United States, the well-known American children's book author doesn't just write in the usual entertaining, easily understandable, and often stirring manner.

In his latest book "Stamped" you can almost see him performing his text: It doesn't seem to keep him on his desk chair or at his lectern, he preaches, assails and soothes, he gesticulates, he wrings his hands, the whole language of this Buchs – from his many exclamations to his apologies for more complicated words like “segregationist” or “assimilationist” – is so tailored to an act of incantation that not much is missing, and one has only to put it to the ear to hear its message.

Fridtjof Küchemann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The message of this book is not even just how incomprehensible, how outrageous, how disturbingly present and powerful racism in the United States was and still is - because that's what "Stamped" focuses on - but what calculation, what duplicity, which Claims make him stand out with amazing consistency and recurrence to this day.

"Stamped" is not a history book, as Jason Reynolds has repeatedly asserted, but a remix: a game with set pieces from the four-year-old book "Branded - The True History of Racism in America" ​​by Ibram X. Kendi.

This work for adult readers is also captivating, narratively strong and analytically sharp, while the first sentence makes it clear what it is about: "Every historian writes at a certain historical point in time and is affected by its effects," it begins.

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However, Jason Reynolds does not bother himself or his readers with considerations of this kind, with questioning his own position.

Names and events that all young people, at least in the United States, probably know, are not explained further either: Rosa Parks is casually mentioned by name, the Jim Crow laws are apparently assumed to be known.

Younger readers of the German translation would definitely be grateful for a classification.

The foreword by the German journalist and writer Alice Hasters does not answer what it means for these readers to look at the history and present of a completely different country from the current situation in Germany and with the local historical baggage.

It is enough for her not to see racism as an "import product from the USA" with "Stamped",

but as a European construct that was “exported to the world” from here.

And developed in the United States under the conditions of the colonization of North America, the independence and civil wars, or the plantation economy based on slave labor.

The Kendi samples that Reynolds chose for his remix are quite enlightening: As the “first racist”, Gomes Eanes de Azurara justified the enslavement of Africans as missionaries in his writings as a chronicler of the Portuguese king in the second half of the 15th century Act: It is God's commission to convert the "savages" to the Christian faith.

Some two hundred years later, Puritans John Cotton and Richard Mather applied this idea to the specific needs of their New World.

The close relationship between slavery, oppression and racism, the justification for superiority and the justification of violence against black people and religious beliefs can be traced over the centuries.