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

by Ibram X. Kendi

All these postracialists had no problem rationalizing the enduring racial disparities, the enduring socioeconomic plight of Black people though blaming Black people, on Fox News, in the Wall Street Journal, on The Rush Limbaugh Show, on the Supreme Court, and from the seats of the Republican Party. Defending racist policy by belittling Black folk: that had been the vocation of producers of racist ideas for nearly six centuries, since Gomes Eanes de Zurara first produced these ideas to defend the African slave-trading of Portugal’s Prince Henry. The postracial attacks triggered counterattacks from antiracists, pointing out racial discrimination from Twitter to Facebook, from Hip Hop to Black Studies scholarship, from shows on MSNBC to Sirius XM Progress, and from periodicals like The Nation to The Root, which then triggered counterattacks from postracialists, who called these antiracists divisive and racist. Assimilationists, stuck in the middle, considered themselves the voices of reasonable moderation. They kept up the drumbeat of the ill-conceived allegory of how far the nation had come and how far it still had to go. The actual American history of racial progress and the simultaneous progression of racism still did not suit their ideology.