Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

by Ibram X. Kendi

If Barack Obama came to embody America’s history of racial progress, then Donald Trump should come to embody America’s history of racist progress.

Young Black males were twenty-one times more likely to be killed by police than their White counterparts between 2010 and 2012, according to federal statistics. The under-recorded, under-analyzed racial disparities between female victims of lethal police force may be even greater. Federal data show that the median wealth of White households is a staggering thirteen times the median wealth of Black households—and Black people are five times more likely to be incarcerated than Whites.

Historically, there have been three sides to this heated argument. A group we can call segregationists has blamed Black people themselves for the racial disparities. A group we can call antiracists has pointed to racial discrimination. A group we can call assimilationists has tried to argue for both, saying that Black people and racial discrimination were to blame for racial disparities. During the ongoing debate over police killings, these three sides to the argument have been on full display. Segregationists have been blaming the recklessly criminal behavior of the Black people who were killed by police officers. Michael Brown was a monstrous, threatening thief; therefore Darren Wilson had reason to fear him and to kill him. Antiracists have been blaming the recklessly racist behavior of the police. The life of this dark-skinned eighteen-year-old did not matter to Darren Wilson. Assimilationists have tried to have it both ways. Both Wilson and Brown acted like irresponsible criminals.

Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era’s racial disparities away from those policies and onto Black people.

Ignorance/hateracist ideasdiscrimination: this causal relationship is largely ahistorical. It has actually been the inverse relationship—racial discrimination led to racist ideas which led to ignorance and hate. Racial discriminationracist ideasignorance/hate: this is the causal relationship driving America’s history of race relations.

Racially discriminatory policies have usually sprung from economic, political, and cultural self-interests, self-interests that are constantly changing. Politicians seeking higher office have primarily created and defended discriminatory policies out of political self-interest—not racist ideas.

Anyone can believe both racist and antiracist ideas, that certain things are wrong with Black people and other things are equal. Fooled by racist ideas, I did not fully realize that the only thing wrong with Black people is that we think something is wrong with Black people. I did not fully realize that the only thing extraordinary about White people is that they think something is extraordinary about White people.

Curse theorists were the first known segregationists. They believed that Black people were naturally and permanently inferior, and totally incapable of becoming White. Climate theorists were the first known assimilationists, believing Black people had been nurtured by the hot sun into a temporary inferiority, but were capable of becoming White if they moved to a cooler climate.

The first recorded slave ship to arrive in colonial America laden with African people was not originally intended for the English colonies. The Spanish ship San Juan Bautista departed Angola in July 1619 hauling 350 captives, probably headed for Vera Cruz, Mexico. Latin American slaveholders had used racist ideas to craft a permanent slavery for the quarter of a million Africans they held at that time. Two pirate ships probably attacked the Spanish ship in the Gulf of Mexico, snatching some 60 captives, and then headed east. Weeks later, in August 1619, the pirates sold 20 of their Angolan captives in Jamestown to Virginia governor George Yeardley, the owner of 1,000 acres.

Benjamin Franklin had spent years across the water lobbying English power for a relaxation of its colonial policies. He was arguing that England was enslaving Americans, and regularly using the analogy that England was making “American whites black.” All along, Samuel Johnson hated this racist analogy. As Franklin sailed back to America at the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in 1775, Johnson released Taxation No Tyranny. He defended the Coercive Acts, judged Americans as inferior to the British, and advocated the arming of enslaved Africans. “How is it,” Johnson asked, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Someone in the colonies had to officially answer the great Samuel Johnson. That someone was Thomas Jefferson.

What did it mean for Jefferson to call “liberty” an “inalienable right” when he enslaved people? It is not hard to figure out what Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and indentured White servants meant when they demanded liberty in 1776. But what about Jefferson and other slaveholders like him, whose wealth and power were dependent upon their land and their slaves? Did they desire unbridled freedom to enslave and exploit? Did they perceive any reduction in their power to be a reduction in their freedom? For these rich men, freedom was not the power to make choices; freedom was the power to create choices. England created the choices, the policies American elites had to abide by, just as planters created choices and policies that laborers had to follow. Only power gave Jefferson and other wealthy White colonists freedom from England. For Jefferson, power came before freedom. Indeed, power creates freedom, not the other way around—as the powerless are taught.

Jefferson, the nation’s most famous antislavery anti-abolitionist, longed for the Louisiana Territory, which he purchased in 1803, to become the republic’s hospital, the place where the illnesses of the original states could be cured—most notably, the illness of slavery. Enslaved Africans would be spread out in the vast Louisiana Territory (if not sent to Africa). The “diffusion [of enslaved Africans] over a greater surface would make them individually happier, and proportionally facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing the burden on a great number of coadjutors.” Jefferson dreamed that the vast Louisiana Territory could swallow slavery. Spread enslaved Africans out, and they will go away?

Jefferson adamantly came to believe that Black freedom should not be discussed in the White halls of Congress, and that southerners should be left alone to solve the problem of slavery at their own pace, in their own way. In his younger years, he had considered gradual emancipation and colonization to be the solution. His gradualism turned into procrastination. In his final years, Jefferson said that “on the subject of emancipation I have ceased to think because [it is] not to be the work of my day.” Slavery had become too lucrative, to too many slaveholders, for emancipation to be Jefferson’s work of those days.