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

by Ibram X. Kendi

It was the nation’s highest-grossing film for two decades, and it enabled millions of Americans to feel redeemed in their lynchings and segregation policies. The film revitalized the Ku Klux Klan, drawing millions of Americans by the 1920s into the club that terrorized Jews, immigrants, socialists, Catholics, and Blacks. Angry at its terrible lies, Black communities everywhere protested The Birth of a Nation.

Over the course of six decades, some 6 million Black southerners left their homes, transforming Black America from a primarily southern population to a national and urban one, and segregationist ideas became nationalized and urbanized in the process.

The League of Nations was created to rule the world. The Wilson administration joined with England and Australia in rejecting Japan’s proposal that the League’s charter confess a commitment to the equality of all peoples. At least President Wilson was being honest. He feared that the relatively good treatment Black soldiers had received in France had “gone to their heads.” To Wilson’s racist Americans, there was nothing more dangerous than a self-respecting Black person with antiracist expectations of immediate equality, rather than the gradual equality of assimilationists or the permanent inequality of segregationists.

While “negative” portrayals of Black people often reinforced racist ideas, “positive” portrayals did not necessarily weaken racist ideas. The “positive” portrayals could be dismissed as extraordinary Negroes, and the “negative” portrayals could be generalized as typical. Even if these racial reformers managed to one day replace all “negative” portrayals with “positive” portrayals in the mainstream media, then, like addicts, racists would then turn to other suppliers. Before Nigger Heaven and the blues, racists found their supply of reinforcing drugs in the minstrel shows, in science, in generalizing any negativities they saw in their interactions with any Black person.

Du Bois argued, Reconstruction was the first and only time the United States had ever truly tasted democracy. After the Civil War, Black and White commoners came together to build democratic state governments providing public resources for the masses of southerners. White elites overthrew these governments by securing the loyalty of White commoners, a feat accomplished not by offering them higher wages, but by holding up the rewards of the lucrative “public and psychological wage.” From Du Bois, historians now term these rewards the “wages of whiteness”: they were the privileges that would accrue to Whites through application of racist ideas and segregation. And to receive them, White laborers needed only stand shoulder to shoulder with White elites on lynched and raped and exploited Black bodies.

At the end of the decade, Du Bois would expound on his antiracist socialism in Dusk of Dawn (1940). “Instead of a horizontal division of classes, there was a vertical fissure, a complete separation of classes by race, cutting square across the economic layers,” Du Bois put forward. The vertical cutting knife was constructed of centuries of racist ideas. “This flat and incontrovertible fact, imported Russian Communism ignored, would not discuss.”2 Du Bois’s antiracist socialism reflected his disenchantment with not just capitalism, but assimilationist thinking.

The more antiracist W. E. B. Du Bois became, the more he realized that trying to persuade powerful racists was a waste of time, and the more certain he felt that Black people must rely on each other. What probably solidified the need for Black solidarity in Du Bois’s mind the most was studying the remedies for the Great Depression coming out of Washington. After taking office, President Franklin D. Roosevelt powered through what he called the “New Deal,” the flurry of government relief programs, job programs, labor rights bills, and capitalism-saving bills passed from 1933 to 1938. To secure the congressional votes of southern Democrats, Roosevelt and northern Democrats crafted these bills such that, to southern Blacks, they seemed more like the Old Deal. Just like in the old days before Roosevelt, segregationists were given the power to locally administer and racially discriminate the relief coming from these federal programs. And segregationists made sure that farmers and domestics—Blacks’ primary vocations—were excluded from the laws’ new job benefits, like minimum wage, social security, unemployment insurance, and unionizing rights.

Next to employment, there may have been no more devastating area of discrimination than housing. The Roosevelt administration’s new Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) handed Black residents the Old Deal when these agencies drew “color-coded” maps, coloring Black neighborhoods in red as undesirable. The maps caused brokers to deny residents new thirty-year mortgages and prevented Black renters from purchasing a home and acquiring wealth. But, of course, the discrimination was ignored or discounted, and the fiscal habits of Black people were blamed for the growing fiscal inequities and segregation created by the policies. Discrimination for Blacks and government assistance for Whites usually won the day.

In the September 1933 issue of The Crisis, Du Bois published “On Being Ashamed,” a look back at the lifelong course of his own thinking, which he generalized as Black America’s thinking. From emancipation to around 1900, the “upper class of colored Americans,” he said, had striven “to escape into the mass of Americans,” practically “ashamed” of those who were not assimilating. But since then, “colored America has discovered itself,” and Du Bois had discovered himself and his singular antiracist consciousness.

The harsh treatment of non-White foreigners, the string of nasty postwar lynchings of returning soldiers, the anti-lynching activism of the internationally renowned artist Paul Robeson, NAACP charges of human rights violations before the United Nations—suddenly these unfree racial policies and actions became a liability. Protecting the freedom brand of the United States became more important for northern politicians than sectional unity and securing segregationists’ votes. In addition, exploiting foreign resources became more important for northern tycoons than exploiting southern resources. Cold War considerations and burgeoning activism suddenly forced civil rights onto the national agenda. But, of course, a recounting of these economic and political considerations was not the race relations story—or the history—that the Truman administration wanted consumed. Race relations, as Gunnar Myrdal wrote, were moral problems in need of morally based, persuasive solutions.

only 6 percent of White Americans thought these rights should be secured immediately—only 6 percent, apparently, were antiracist in 1947.14 On February 2, 1948, Truman urged Congress to implement the recommendations of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, regardless of the lack of support among White Americans. “[The] position of the United States in the world today” made civil rights “especially urgent,” Truman stressed. The backlash was significant. One Texas representative kicked off his winning US Senate campaign by rallying 10,000 supporters in Austin to view Truman’s civil rights proposals as “a farce and a sham—an effort to set up a police state in the guise of liberty.”

Between 1944 and 1971, federal spending for former soldiers in this “model welfare system” totaled over $95 billion. As with the New Deal welfare programs, however, Black veterans faced discrimination that reduced or denied them the benefits.

With the slavery-deforming-Black-people theory no longer sustainable in the early 1950s, assimilationists conjured up the segregation-deforming-Black-people theory. They cited the famous doll tests of psychologists Kenneth Clark and Mamie Clark, as well as popular books on the subject, such as The Mark of Oppression (1951) by two psychoanalysts. Discrimination and the separation of the races, the assimilationists argued, had been having a horrible effect on Black personalities and self-esteem.

activists desegregating southern businesses that low-income Blacks could hardly afford did not seem like racial progress to Du Bois, who refused to measure racial progress by the gains of Black elites. Du Bois had been waiting for a political-economic program to arise. He had been waiting for something like scholar Michael Harrington’s shocking anti-poverty best seller in 1962, The Other America. “A wall of prejudice is erected to keep the Negroes out of advancement,” Harrington wrote. “The more education a Negro has, the more economic discrimination he faces.” Harrington used statistics to show that uplift suasion did not work. Moreover, he pointed out that “the laws against color can be removed, but that will leave the poverty that is the historic and institutionalized consequence of color.” By the time Harrington tossed a war on poverty onto the Democrats’ agenda, Du Bois had left the country.

MOST AMERICANS DID not consider assimilationists to be racists. They did not consider northern segregation and racial disparities to be indicative of racist policies, and the avalanche of antiracist protests for jobs, housing, education, and justice from Boston to Los Angeles in 1963 hardly changed their views on the matter. The eyes of the nation, the world, and American history remained on the supposedly really racist region, the South.

the Negro may have been taking too much responsibility for the Negro’s problems, and therefore not doing enough to force the “white world” to end the discriminatory sources of the problems. Elite Blacks, raised on the strategy of uplift suasion and its racist conviction that every Negro represented the race—and therefore that the behavior of every single Black person was partially (or totally) responsible for racist ideas—had long policed each other. They had also policed the masses and the media portrayals of Blacks in their efforts to ensure that every single Black person presented herself or himself admirably before White Americans. They operated on the assumption that every single action before White America either confirmed or defied stereotypes, either helped or harmed the Negro race.

By August 1963, 78 percent of White Americans believed that racial discrimination had harmed the US reputation abroad. But not many inside (or outside) of the Kennedy administration were willing to admit that the growing groundswell of support in Washington for strong civil rights legislation had more to do with winning the Cold War in Africa and Asia than with helping African Americans.

Arizona senator Barry Goldwater’s nomination for president signified his star power over the escalating conservative movement in American politics, powered by his 1960 chart-topper, The Conscience of a Conservative. Inspiring millions of Democrats to turn Republican, including Hollywood movie star Ronald Reagan, Goldwater’s tract deeply massaged those Americans who had outgrown (or never needed) government assistance. Welfare “transforms the individual from a dignified, industrious, self-reliant spiritual being into a dependent animal creature without his knowing it,” Goldwater wrote without a shred of evidence. Many proud, dignified, industrious, self-reliant members of the White middle class, who had derived their wealth from the welfare of inheritance, the New Deal, or the GI Bill, accepted Goldwater’s dictum as truth, despite the fact that parental or government assistance had not transformed them or their parents into dependent animal creatures. After looking at White mothers on welfare as “deserving” for decades, these Goldwater conservatives saw the growing number of Black mothers on welfare as “undeserving”—as dependent animal creatures.

Yet even with a voting rights bill, the United States would not be finished, President Johnson had the courage to declare in his commencement address to Howard University graduates in June. “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains[,] and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” It was quite possibly the most antiracist avowal ever uttered from the lips of a US president. And Johnson was just getting started. “We seek not just freedom but opportunity,” he said. “We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.” Racial progress had come primarily for “a growing middle class minority,” while for poor Blacks, Johnson said, “the walls are rising and the gulf is widening.”

Nixon framed his campaign, as a close adviser explained, to allow a potential supporter to “avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by [the] racist appeal.” How would he do that? Easy. Demean Black people, and praise White people, without ever saying Black people or White people.1 Historians have named this the “southern strategy.” In fact, it was—and remained over the next five decades—the national Republican strategy as the GOP tried to unite northern and southern anti-Black (and anti-Latina/o) racists, war hawks, and fiscal and social conservatives. The strategy was right on time. In a 1968 Gallup poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed Nixon’s campaign slogan: “Law and order has broken down in the country.” A Nixon television advertisement shrieked frightening music and frightening images of violent and bloodied activists. A deep voiceover says, “I pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States.” The ad “hit it right on the nose. It’s all about those damn Negro–Puerto Rican groups out there,” Nixon reportedly said in private. In public, the tune was the same, save the racial lyrics.

President Nixon professed there were only two “times when an abortion is necessary”: “when you have a black and a white or a rape.”

Blackmun gave America a timeless lesson: “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently. We cannot—we dare not—let the Fourteenth Amendment perpetuate racial supremacy.”

The Klan almost tripled its national membership between 1971 and 1980, unleashing its gun-toting terrorism in more than one hundred towns to try to destroy the gains of the 1960s. Lynchings were still occurring—at least twelve were committed in Mississippi in 1980, twenty-eight Black youngsters were killed in Atlanta from 1979 to 1982, and random street-corner executions took place in Buffalo in 1980. But Klan violence and lynchings by private citizens paled in comparison to the terror being perpetrated by gangs of policemen across the nation, from strip-searches and sexual abuse of Black women to pistol-whipping of Black males. By the early 1980s, one study showed that for every White person killed by police officers, police killed twenty-two Black people.

Reagan wasted little time in knocking down the fiscal gains that middle- and low-income people had made over the past four decades. Seemingly as quickly and deeply as Congress allowed and the poor economy justified, Reagan cut taxes for the rich and social programs for middle- and low-income families, while increasing the military budget.

During Reagan’s first year in office, the median income of Black families declined by 5.2 percent, and the number of poor Americans in general increased by 2.2 million. In one year, the New York Times observed, “much of the progress that had been made against poverty in the 1960s and 1970s” had been “wiped out.”

In 1982, Reagan issued one of the most devastating executive orders of the twentieth century. “We must mobilize all our forces to stop the flow of drugs into this country” and to “brand drugs such as marijuana exactly for what they are—dangerous,” Reagan said, announcing his War on Drugs. Criminologists hardly feared that the new war would disproportionately arrest and incarcerate African Americans. Many criminologists were publishing fairytales for studies that found that racial discrimination no longer existed in the criminal justice system. “We can fight the drug problem, and we can win,” Reagan announced. It was an astonishing move. Drug crime was declining. Only 2 percent of Americans viewed drugs as the nation’s most pressing problem. Few considered marijuana to be a particularly dangerous drug, especially in comparison with the more addictive heroin. Substance-abuse therapists were shocked by Reagan’s unfounded claim that America could “put drug abuse on the run through stronger law enforcement.”

The prison population quadrupled between 1980 and 2000 due entirely to stiffer sentencing policies, not more crime. Between 1985 and 2000, drug offenses accounted for two-thirds of the spike in the inmate population. By 2000, Blacks comprised 62.7 percent and Whites 36.7 percent of all drug offenders in state prisons—and not because they were selling or using more drugs. That year, the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse reported that 6.4 percent of Whites and 6.4 percent of Blacks were using illegal drugs. Racial studies on drug dealers usually found similar rates. One 2012 analysis, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, found that White youths (6.6 percent) were 32 percent more likely than Black youths (5 percent) to sell drugs. But Black youths were far more likely to get arrested for it.

Since heavily policed inner-city Blacks were much more likely than Whites to be arrested and imprisoned in the 1990s—since more homicides occurred in their neighborhoods—racists assumed that Black people were actually using more drugs, dealing more in drugs, and committing more crimes of all types than White people. These false assumptions fixed the image in people’s minds of the dangerous Black inner-city neighborhood as well as the contrasting image of the safe White suburban neighborhood, a racist notion that affected so many decisions of so many Americans, from housing choices to drug policing to politics, that they cannot be quantified. The “dangerous Black neighborhood” conception is based on racist ideas, not reality. There is such a thing as a dangerous “unemployed neighborhood,” however. One study, for example, based on the National Longitudinal Youth Survey data collected from 1976 to 1989, found that young Black males were far more likely than young White males to engage in serious violent crime. But when the researchers compared only employed young males, the racial differences in violent behavior disappeared. Certain violent crime rates were higher in Black neighborhoods simply because unemployed people were concentrated in Black neighborhoods.

But Reagan’s tough-on-crime Republicans had no intention of committing political suicide among their donors and redirecting the blame for violent crime from the lawbreakers onto Reaganomics. Nor were they willing to lose their seats by trying to create millions of new jobs in a War on Unemployment, which would certainly have reduced violent crime. Instead, turning the campaign for law and order into a War on Drugs enriched many political lives over the next two decades. It hauled millions of impoverished non-White, nonviolent drug users and dealers into prisons where they could not vote, and later paroled them without their voting rights. A significant number of close elections would have come out differently if felons had not been disenfranchised, including at least seven senatorial races between 1980 and 2000, as well as the presidential election of 2000. What an ingeniously cruel way to quietly snatch away the voting power of your political opponents.

White Americans were far more likely to fear those distant Black mugshots behind their television screens than their neighborhoods’ White drunk drivers, who were killing them at a greater rate.

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia neonatologist Hallam Hurt began following the lives of 224 “crack babies” born in Philadelphia between 1989 and 1992, and she fully anticipated “seeing a host of problems.” In 2013, she concluded her study with a simple finding: poverty was worse for kids than crack. Medical researchers had to finally admit that “crack babies” were like the science for racist ideas: they never existed.

A truly multicultural nation ruled by multiculturalists would not have Christianity as its unofficial standard religion. It would not have suits as its standard professional attire. English would not be its standard language or be assessed by standardized tests. Ethnic Studies would not be looked upon as superfluous to educational curricula. Afrocentric scholars and other multicultural theorists, lecturing on multiple cultural perspectives, would not be looked upon as controversial. No cultural group would be directly and indirectly asked to learn and conform to any other group’s cultural norms in public in order to get ahead. A nation of different-looking people is not automatically multicultural or diverse if most of them practice or are learning to practice the same culture. The United States was maybe a multicultural nation in homes, behind closed doors, but certainly not in public in 1997. Racists in the United States were only embracing diversity and multiculturalism in name. In practice, they were enforcing cultural standards.

“We are here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome,” Bill Clinton rejoiced to an audience of reporters and cameras. “Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.” It was a map that should “revolutionize” medicine by giving scientists information about the “genetic roots” of disease. It should also revolutionize racial science, Clinton announced. The map shows us “that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.” One of the scientists responsible for sequencing the human genome, Craig Venter, was even more frank with reporters. “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis,” Venter said. His research team at Celera Genomics had determined “the genetic code” of five individuals, who were identified as either “Hispanic, Asian, Caucasian or African American,” and the scientists could not tell one race from another.10 When the press conference ceased and the reporters broadcast their stories, the old racist saying that a human book can be judged by its cover should have ceased. The refrain of “White blood” and “Black diseases” should have ceased, and the segregationist chorus saying that human beings were created unequal, that played for five centuries, should have also ceased. Science did not start the singing, though, and science would not stop it. Segregationists had too many racist policies to hide, racial disparities to justify, scie...

“Race is not a biological category that is politically charged,” she added. “It is a political category that has been disguised as a biological one.”

O’Connor’s judgment was way off, according to United for a Fair Economy researchers. The racial “parity date” at the existing pace of gradual equality was not twenty-five years, but five-hundred years, and for some racial disparities, thousands of years from 2003.

Scientists know that, developmentally, when children are sick or hurt, or confused or angry, one of the ways they express those feelings is through acting out, because children have difficulty identifying and communicating complex feelings (over things like hunger or parental incarceration or police harassment). While misbehaving White children have received compassion and tolerance—as they should—misbehaving Black children have been more likely to hear “No Excuses” and to be on the receiving end of zero tolerance and handcuffs. More than 70 percent of students arrested at school during the 2009–2010 school year were Black or Latina/o, according to Department of Education statistics.

In the era of color-blind racism, no matter how gruesome the racial crime, no matter how much evidence was stacked against them, racists were standing up before the judge and claiming “not guilty.” But how many criminals actually confess when they don’t have to? From “civilizers” to standardized testers, assimilationists have rarely confessed to racism. Enslavers and Jim Crow segregationists went to their graves claiming innocence. George W. Bush will likely do the same. “I faced a lot of criticism as president,” Bush mused in his post-presidency memoir. “I didn’t like hearing people claim that I lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all-time low.”

Months into Obama’s presidency, the postracialists slammed down their new ground rules for race relations: Criticize millions of Black people whenever you want, as often as you want. That’s not racialism or racism or hate. You’re not even talking about race. But whenever you criticize a single White discriminator, that’s race-speak, that’s hate-speak, that’s being racist. If the purpose of racist ideas had always been to silence the antiracist resisters to racial discrimination, then the postracial line of attack may have been the most sophisticated silencer to date.

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.

It has been true that racist policies have benefited White people in general at the expense of Black people (and others) in general. That is the story of racism, of unequal opportunity in a nutshell. But it is also true that a society of equal opportunity, without a top 1 percent hoarding the wealth and power, would actually benefit the vast majority of White people much more than racism does. It is not coincidental that slavery kept the vast majority of southern Whites poor. It is not coincidental that more White Americans thrived during the antiracist movements from the 1930s to the early 1970s than ever before or since. It is not coincidental that the racist movements that followed in the late twentieth century paralleled the stagnation or reduction of middle- and low-income Whites’ salaries and their skyrocketing costs of living. Antiracists should stop connecting selfishness to racism, and unselfishness to antiracism. Altruism is wanted, not required. Antiracists do not have to be altruistic. Antiracists do not have to be selfless. Antiracists merely have to have intelligent self-interest, and to stop consuming those racist ideas that have engendered so much unintelligent self-interest over the years. It is in the intelligent self-interest of middle- and upper-income Blacks to challenge the racism affecting the Black poor, knowing they will not be free of the racism that is slowing their socioeconomic rise until poor Blacks are free of racism. It is in the intelligent...

In fact, self-interest leads to racist policies, which lead to racist ideas leading to all the ignorance and hate. Racist policies were created out of self-interest. And so, they have usually been voluntarily rolled back out of self-interest. The popular and glorious version of history saying that abolitionists and civil rights activists have steadily educated and persuaded away American racist ideas and policies sounds great. But it has never been the complete story, or even the main story. Politicians passed the civil and voting rights measures in the 1860s and the 1960s primarily out of political and economic self-interest—not an educational or moral awakening. And these laws did not spell the doom of racist policies. The racist policies simply evolved. There has been a not-so-glorious progression of racism, and educational persuasion has failed to stop it, and Americans have failed to recognize it.

“Negro leaders” thought that “white Americans did not know of or realize the continuing plight of the Negro,” he wrote in a 1935 essay. “Accordingly, for the last two decades, we have striven by book and periodical, by speech and appeal, by various dramatic methods of agitation, to put the essential facts before the American people. Today there can be no doubt that Americans know the facts; and yet they remain for the most part indifferent and unmoved.”11 In the eight decades since Du Bois wrote his essay, antiracist Americans have continued to strive by similar methods to put the essential facts before the American people. There can be no doubt that the producers and defenders and ignorers of racist policies know the facts. And yet they remain for the most part indifferent and unmoved: indifferent to the need to pass sweeping legislation completely overhauling the enslaving justice system; unmoved in pushing for initiatives like fighting crime with more and better jobs; indifferent to calls to decriminalize drugs and find alternatives to prisons; unmoved in empowering local residents to hire and fire the officers policing their communities. They remain for the most part unwilling to pass grander legislation that re-envisions American race relations by fundamentally assuming that discrimination is behind the racial disparities (and not what’s wrong with Black folk), and by creating an agency that aggressively investigates the disparities and punishes conscious and unconsci...

Lawmakers have the power today to stamp out racial discrimination, to create racial “equality as a fact,” to quote LBJ, if they want to. They have the ability to champion the antiracist cause of immediate equality, echoing those old chants of immediate emancipation. They have the ability to turn their back on the assimilationist cause of gradual equality and the segregationist cause of permanent inequality. But local and federal lawmakers fear the repercussions from campaign donors and voters. They know that the postracialists would reject any sweeping antiracism bill as discriminatory and hateful toward White people just as enslavers and segregationists did before them, even if such a bill would actually benefit nearly all Americans, including White people. If racism is eliminated, many White people in the top economic and political brackets fear that it would eliminate one of the most effective tools they have at their disposal to conquer and control and exploit not only non-Whites, but also both low-income and middle-income White people.

It is the primary job of the powerful to know the facts of America. So trying to educate knowledgeable people does not make much sense. Trying to educate these powerful producers or defenders or ignorers of American racism about its harmful effects is like trying to educate a group of business executives about how harmful their products are. They already know, and they don’t care enough to end the harm.

Although uplift and persuasion and education have failed, history is clear on what has worked, and what will one day eradicate racist ideas. Racist ideas have always been the public relations arm of the company of racial discriminators and their products: racial disparities. Eradicate the company, and the public relations arm goes down, too. Eradicate racial discrimination, then racist ideas will be eradicated, too. To undermine racial discrimination, Americans must focus their efforts on those who have the power to undermine racial discrimination. Protesting against anyone or anything else is as much of a waste of time as trying to educate or persuade powerful people. History has shown that those Americans who have had the power to undermine racial discrimination have rarely done so. They have done so, however, when they realized on their own that eliminating some form of racial discrimination was in their self-interest, much as President Abraham Lincoln chose to end slavery to save the Union. They have also conceded to antiracist change as a better alternative than the disruptive, disordered, politically harmful, and/or unprofitable conditions that antiracist protesters created.

The most effective protests have been fiercely local; they are protests that have been started by antiracists focusing on their immediate surroundings: their blocks, neighborhoods, schools, colleges, jobs, and professions. These local protests have then become statewide protests, and statewide protests have then become national protests, and national protests have then become international protests. But it all starts with one person, or two people, or tiny groups, in their small surroundings, engaging in energetic mobilization of antiracists into organizations; and chess-like planning and adjustments during strikes, occupations, insurrections, campaigns, and fiscal and bodily boycotts, among a series of other tactics to force power to eradicate racist policies. Antiracist protesters have created positions of power for themselves by articulating clear demands and making it clearer that they will not stop—and policing forces cannot stop them—until their demands are met.

Protesting against racist power and succeeding can never be mistaken for seizing power. Any effective solution to eradicating American racism must involve Americans committed to antiracist policies seizing and maintaining power over institutions, neighborhoods, counties, states, nations—the world. It makes no sense to sit back and put the future in the hands of people committed to racist policies, or people who regularly sail with the wind of self-interest, toward racism today, toward antiracism tomorrow. An antiracist America can only be guaranteed if principled antiracists are in power, and then antiracist policies become the law of the land, and then antiracist ideas become the common sense of the people, and then the antiracist common sense of the people holds those antiracist leaders and policies accountable. And that day is sure to come. No power lasts forever. There will come a time when Americans will realize that the only thing wrong with Black people is that they think something is wrong with Black people. There will come a time when racist ideas will no longer obstruct us from seeing the complete and utter abnormality of racial disparities. There will come a time when we will love humanity, when we will gain the courage to fight for an equitable society for our beloved humanity, knowing, intelligently, that when we fight for humanity, we are fighting for ourselves. There will come a time. Maybe, just maybe, that time is now.