In April 2016, author, historian 

and professor Ibram X. Kendi 
published 
his 
National 
Book 

Award-winning “Stamped from 
the 
Beginning.” 
In 
what 
he 

subtitles “The Definitive History 
of Racist Ideas in America,” Kendi’s 
exhaustive research chronicles the 
timeline of anti-Black racist ideas 
and their shifting power throughout 
American history. 

Kendi, one of America’s leading 

antiracist voices, was the youngest-
ever winner of the National Book 
Award for Nonfiction in 2016. 
The same year, Jason Reynolds’s 
“Ghost” was nominated for the 
National Book Award in Young 
People’s Literature. This prestigious 
celebration of the best literature in 
America is where the two men met.

But, it wasn’t until March of this 

year, nearly four years later, that 
“Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and 
You” was released — the remix of 
Kendi’s original book, reimagined 
by Reynolds. In an interview with 
“CBS This Morning,” Reynolds 
reveals that he initially declined 
Kendi’s request to write the remix: 
“I said no because I’m careful about 
tampering with things that I believe 
are sacred.” Yet, he finally agreed 

when he realized “this work was 
bigger than the both of us, and it’s 
not about either one of us.” 

Reynolds’s 
remix 
is 
geared 

toward a younger audience, readers 
12 and up. While Kendi is a scholar 
who holds a position as the Director 
of the Antiracist Research & Policy 
Center at American University, 
where he is a professor of history 
and 
international 
relations, 

Reynolds is a writer of books and 
poetry for young adults and middle-
grade audiences. On his website, 
Reynolds declares that he plans to 
“not write boring books.” He goes 
on to say that “I know there are a lot 
of young people who hate reading… 
but they don’t actually hate books, 
they hate boredom” — which is one 
of the initial obstacles he faced with 
the remix. 

So Reynolds, who has said that 

young people don’t like to read 
history books, decided that his 
remix wasn’t a history book, “but 
a book about the present: here and 
now.” 

Like Kendi’s original version, 

Reynolds structures the book using 
five historical figures: Puritan 
minister 
Cotton 
Mather 
from 

the 17th century, founding father 
Thomas 
Jefferson, 
abolitionist 

William Lloyd Garrison, writer 
and activist W. E. B. Du Bois and 
radical activist and writer Angela 
Davis. The division of the book 

into five sections coincides with 
the five guides, spanning from the 
1400s to modern day. While that 
encompasses over 600 years of 
history, Reynolds’s remix caps at 
248 pages, half of Kendi’s 500-page 
original. 

Another important similarity 

in the remix is the three different 
definitions used to identify and 
describe 
the 
people 
explored: 

segregationists, assimilationists and 
antiracists. These three categories 
are repeated frequently throughout 
the book, helping us to understand 
the historical figures represented 
along with their motives and beliefs 
(which we often discover to be 
contradictory). 

Reynolds 
simplifies 
the 

definitions to help young readers 
grasp 
the 
complex 
material, 

calling 
segregationists 
“haters,” 

assimilationists as “the people who 
like you, but only with quotation 
marks” and antiracists as “the 
people who love you because you’re 
like you.” Later, when discussing 
figures like Abraham Lincoln, it was 
helpful to have these definitions as 
we approached his contradictory 
views — like that he wanted slavery 
gone, but didn’t think Black people 
should 
necessarily 
have 
equal 

rights: an assimilationist. 

An 

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Monday, August 31, 2020 — 15

BOOK REVIEW

CULTURE NOTEBOOK
CULTURE NOTEBOOK

Review: ‘Stamped: Racism, 
Anti-Racism and You’

KALAMAZOO PUBLIC LIBRARY

LILLY PEARCE
Daily Arts Writer

On Dec. 13, 1963, Bob Dylan 

was given the “Tom Paine 
Award” by the Emergency Civil 
Liberties Committee for his 
political 
activism. 
A 
visibly 

shaken, and likely drunk, Dylan 
said he accepted the award on 
behalf of “everybody that went 
down to Cuba,” then unleashed 
a doozy: “I got to admit that 
the man who shot President 
Kennedy, Lee Oswald … I saw 
some of myself in him.” The 
crowd booed him off the stage. 

A 
few 
days 
later, 
Dylan 

released a statement that read, 
in part, “If there’s violence in 
the times, then there must be 
violence in me.” 

*
It’s 2020, and the times are 

more violent than ever. They have 
been for a while. Where has Bob 
Dylan been in the era of Donald 
Trump, mass shootings, climate 
crisis and COVID-19? Where’s 
the singer who marched on 
Washington with Martin Luther 
King Jr. and wrote searing 
political 
anthems 
like 
“The 

Times They Are a-Changin’,” 
“The Lonesome Death of Hattie 
Carroll” and “Only a Pawn in 
Their Game?” He was releasing 
Sinatra cover albums — three, 
to be exact — from 2015-2017. It 

seemed, for those who hoped for 
a guiding message from rock’s 
poet laureate, that Dylan had 
decided to sit this one out. 

Yet, in June 2020, Bob Dylan 

is back with his first album of 
original music in almost a decade 
— Rough and Rowdy Ways. It’s a 
career-defining masterpiece, an 
album both bracingly current 
yet timeless in its compositional 
breadth, pulling from the best 
of Dylan’s work through the 
decades. Rough and Rowdy Ways 
has the enthralling auditory grit 
of 1997’s Grammy-winning Time 
Out of Mind, the socio-political 
layers of Highway 61 Revisited 
and the personal revelations of 
Blood on the Tracks. 

“Today and tomorrow, and 

yesterday too,” Dylan begins the 
album’s first song, “I Contain 
Multitudes.” “The flowers are 
dyin’, like all things do.” Dylan’s 
message is clear from the start: 
These are the end times. Yet after 
this apocalyptic pronouncement, 
he implores an unnamed woman 
to “Follow me close … I’ll lose 
my mind if you don’t come with 
me.” In Dylan’s world, where 
“Everything’s flowing, all at the 
same time,” one can “sleep with 
life and death in the same bed.” 
Basically, even if everyone’s 
going to die, they don’t have to 
die alone.

In 
a 
whimsical, 
almost 

snide cadence, Dylan throws 
in a myriad of other personal 
complexities, but one line stands 

out: “I’m just like Anne Frank, 
like Indiana Jones and them 
British bad boys the Rolling 
Stones.” The lyric bristles at 
the ear, mainly because it’s 
so impenetrable. How is the 
79-year-old Dylan, while a rock 
star like the Rolling Stones, like 
Anne Frank or Indiana Jones? 

Right from the start, Rough 

and Rowdy Ways is sonically 
striking. Dylan’s last original 
album, 2012’s Tempest, was 
chock-full of crashing drums, 
out-of-control guitars and a 
voice that sounded like Dylan 
had swallowed a gallon of rocks. 
Dylan has self-produced every 
one of his albums since 1997, 
and generally favors a raw, 
unfiltered performance by both 
himself and his tour band. This 
time, though, he’s meticulously 
crafted every aspect of the 
album. The instrumentation and 
his voice transform to reflect the 
subject matter of each song. “I 
Contain Multitudes” is almost 
completely acoustic, intimately 
shading the confessional lyrics 
as the listener is drawn in by 
Dylan’s soft voice. 

This comfort is ripped away 

on the second track, “False 
Prophet.” Amid crashing drums 
and 
smarmy 
guitar, 
Dylan 

continues the dark lamentations 
in a Tempest-style bark — “I 
know how it happened, I saw it 
begin. I opened my heart to the 
world, and the world caved in.” 
While he doesn’t yet reveal what 

caused this apocalypse, Dylan 
asserts with haggard surety “I’m 
no false prophet, I just know 
what I know.”

Things get weirder in “My 

Own Version of You,” a song 
backed by a mournful steel guitar 
straight out of a retro horror 
flick. Dylan details his plan to 
dig up “limbs and livers and 
brains and hearts” and “bring 
someone to life … someone who 
feels the way that I feel.” Again, 
love and death are bedmates. 
While Dylan, parroting Victor 
Frankenstein, swears to act 
with “decency and common 
sense … for the benefit of all 
mankind” with his creation, he 
also asks “What would Julius 
Caesar do?” Like Caesar, and all 
authoritarians, Dylan considers 
his actions, however inhumane, 
permissible since he believes 
himself to be working for the 
common good. Adding to this 
prescient commentary, Dylan 

invites the listener to “Step right 
into the burning hell, where 
some of the best-known enemies 
of mankind dwell.” 

In 
these 
flames, 
Dylan 

somehow finds a way to sing a 
masterful love song, “I’ve Made 
Up My Mind to Give Myself to 
You.” 

“I’m sitting on my terrace, 

lost in the stars,” he begins. 
The Sinatra phase has paid 
off 
— 
Dylan’s 
voice 
hasn’t 

sounded this sharp in decades, 
a cavernous croon that soars 
with genuine affection. The 
soft instrumentation builds to 
a sublime electric guitar solo 
that’s one of the best moments 
on the album. There are also 
faint, 
almost 
imperceptible 

backing singers, one of which 
just might be Fiona Apple, whose 
soft choral drone gives the song a 
sense of deep melancholy. When 
Dylan sings, almost tearfully, “I 
don’t think I could bear to live 

my life alone,” it’s as moving as 
anything from his love-sick opus 
Blood on the Tracks. Thankfully 
Dylan meets someone, telling 
this unnamed lover “I’ll lay down 
beside you when everyone’s 
gone.” In a time when reality 
itself seems to be falling apart, 
Dylan’s honesty is piercing. 

Then comes “Black Rider.” To 

the tune of a slithering acoustic 
guitar, 
Dylan 
criticizes 
an 

unnamed man for womanizing, 
violence and arrogance (all of 
which Dylan has displayed thus 
far in the album, making one 
wonder if the song is a soliloquy, 
critiquing 
Dylan’s 
own 
dark, 

masculine shades). Whoever the 
black rider is, Dylan tells the guy 
“You’ve been on the job too long,” 
before giving one the album’s most 
brutal, unexpected lines.

Bob Dylan in 2020: Love, 
violence in the end of times

MUSIC NOTEBOOK
MUSIC NOTEBOOK

DYLAN YONO
Daily Arts Writer

POETS.ORG

Pop culture would have us 

believe that the Venn diagram 
between sports fans and art nerds 
is more or less two separate circles. 
As a humble representative of the 
tiny sliver in the middle, I want to 
introduce my friends on both sides 
to the world of their culturally 
prescribed adversary. There are 
some similarities between the 
two that few would expect to 
find — similarities that, I argue, 
allow us to view sport as art. Let’s 
set the scene. Our protagonist 
is NFL analyst Adam Schefter, 
who stakes his reputation on his 
straight-shooter, 
no-nonsense 

reporting. Schefter’s Twitter feed 
is the Associated Press of the NFL 
world; if he says something, it’s 
true. A few weeks ago, Schefter 
put on his best suit, set up his 
webcam in front of his well-
stocked bookcase, and joined an 
ESPN broadcast held over Zoom, 
complete with all the aggressive 
rock music, flashy graphics and 
artificial urgency we’ve come to 
expect from the network. The 
occasion? The announcement of 
the order in which next season’s 
NFL games will be played in.

One might think the order of 

games isn’t particularly interesting 
news, perhaps worthy of a short 
segment highlighting interesting 
matchups, but ESPN had other 
thoughts. They instead hosted a 
three-hour show breaking down 
each team’s schedule with such 
pressing commentary as “X team 
won’t be able to handle so many 
games in cold cities in December,” 
or, “Y rookie quarterback will be 
demoralized by difficult opponents 
early on.” This was stated with a 
baffling level of confidence, despite 
being months away from a season 
whose fate is already uncertain 
due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 
Meanwhile, Schefter desperately 
tries to do the impossible and fill 
the home stretch of this painfully 
long production with anything 
resembling objective analysis.

How did Schefter find himself 

in this position? The ESPN show 
is an extreme example of the 
increasing role of narrative in 
professional sports. A three-hour 
show for a schedule release is a bit 
excessive, but the stories that the 
media constructs around games 
are a large part of what makes 
them so exciting. Each NFL team 
plays 16 regular-season games. 
Though the average broadcast is 
over three hours long, the ball is 
only in play for about 11 minutes 
per game. To make these short 
bursts of action feel consequential, 
the media sets up elaborate 
storylines in the hours and days 
leading up to games. They do so by 
creating characters out of athletes 
and framing games such that 
they follow a traditional narrative 
arc, putting their characters in 
situations where they have to 
overcome obstacles larger than 
the game itself. The week one 
matchup between the Saints and 
the Buccaneers, for instance, 
becomes not just a potentially 
good game, but a battle between 
veterans Drew Brees and Tom 
Brady to solidify their legacy as 
the best quarterback in the league 
and to push the limits of how many 
years they can play at a high level. 
Analysts will routinely praise the 
determination and perseverance 
required of Brees and Brady to play 
through their 40s. 

Each play thus carries far 

more weight, as it’s not just 
the game on the line, but also a 
whole host of abstract values and 
principles. In this light, analysts 
can 
be 
considered 
analogous 

to storytellers — more so than 
regular journalists, as they add 
far more narrative to their subject 
matter than a reporter covering 
a “real” news story. That is to 
say, the difference between the 
actual events and their portrayal 
in the media is greater in sports 
journalism than it is in other 
branches of journalism. Athletes 
are, in a sense, analogous to 
performers, coaches to directors, 
referees to stage managers and 
so on. The result is a coherent 
“show” so to speak, a circular 
system consisting of the game 
and the media’s commentary 
about the game. The tendency to 

narrativize games can be found in 
other sports, but the NFL and its 
media apparatus have used these 
techniques the most. It pays off for 
them too. The NFL has for some 
time been the most watched sports 
league in the United States. One 
might argue that this phenomenon 
is just a way to sensationalize 
the game and increase profits. 
Though I’m inclined to agree, 
the narrativization of sport has 
nonetheless created the conditions 
by which sport can — and I think 
should — be considered art.

Coinciding with the rise of 

narrativized sport, we’ve seen 
athletes and sports journalists 
broaden the scope of the issues that 
they’re willing to discuss. Whereas 
sports media in the past generally 
had a narrow focus on the sport 
itself (e.g. play-by-play recaps, 
statistics, 
trade 
and 
contract 

negotiations, etc.), it now doesn’t 
shy away players’ personalities, 
drama and even broader social 
issues that don’t directly relate to 
sports. This is mostly an organic 
process, without any motivation 
outside 
of 
generating 
more 

content for its own sake. People 
in sports media are probably not 
intentionally making sport like 
art, and if they are, it is only for 
the practical concern of making 
games more entertaining. There 
are, however, real stakes to these 
conversations.

Sports media, especially NFL 

media, often uses rhetoric that 
praises 
athletes’ 
toughness, 

determination, 
grit 
and 

other similar attributes. This 
traditionally masculine rhetoric 
is often channelled to destructive 
ends. 
Athletes’ 
toughness 
is 

used to justify and downplay the 
serious health risks associated 
with playing a contact sport like 
football. Countless football players 
have suffered from CTE, and 
though the NFL has made some 
small gestures to player safety, 
the 
problem 
remains 
largely 

unaddressed. Violence by athletes 
is routinely swept under the rug.

 

On the intersection of 

sports and the arts

SEJJAD ALKHALBY

Daily Arts Writer

ARTS NOTEBOOK

Read more online at 

michigandaily.com
Read more online at 

michigandaily.com

Read more online at 

michigandaily.com

