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

by Ibram X. Kendi

The racist debate over the cause of Blackness—climate or curse—had been joined by this new racist debate over Blacks’ capability for Christianity. The segregationist belief that enslaved Africans should not or could not be baptized was so widespread, and so taboo to discuss—as Richard Ligon found in Barbados—that virtually no enslaver took to writing to defend it in a major piece in the 1600s. That did not stop the assimilationists, who believed that lowly enslaved Africans, practicing their supposed animalistic religions, were capable of being raised to Christianity. In the 1660s, there emerged a missionary movement to publicize this divine duty to resistant slaveholders and slaves. Richard Mather’s grandson spent his adult life carrying this movement to the churches of New England. But Mather did not live to see it.