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

by Ibram X. Kendi

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.

If Black people make up 13 percent of the US population, then Black people should own somewhere close to 13 percent of US wealth. But today, the United States remains nowhere close to racial equity. African Americans own 2.7 percent of the nation’s wealth.

This is a racial disparity, and racial disparities are older than the life of the United States.

there have been three sides to this heated argument. Segregationist ideas have blamed Black people themselves for the racial disparities. Antiracist ideas have pointed to racist policy. Assimilationist ideas have conveyed both: Black people and racist policy were to blame for racial disparities.

It may not be surprising that Jefferson Davis regarded Black people as biologically distinct and inferior to White people—and Black skin as an ugly stamp on the beautiful White canvas of normal human skin—and this Black stamp as a signifier of the Negro’s everlasting inferiority.

it was assimilationist scholars who first used and defined and popularized the term “racism” during the 1940s.

All these self-serving efforts by powerful factions to define their racist rhetoric as “not racist” has left Americans thoroughly divided over, and ignorant of, what racist ideas truly are.

They have allowed Americans who think something is wrong with Black people to believe, somehow, that they are “not racist.”

But to say something is wrong with a group is to say something is infe...

My definition of a racist idea is a simple one: it is any concept that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group in any way. I define anti-Black racist ideas—the subject of this book—as any idea suggesting that Black people, or any group of Black people, are inferior in any way to another racial group. Like

Then, the legalization of Jim Crow brought on the progression of racist policies in the late nineteenth century. The outlawing of Jim Crow in 1964 brought on racial progress.

Hate and ignorance have not driven the history of racist ideas in America. Racist policies have driven the history of racist ideas in America. And

Time and again, powerful and brilliant people 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.

Racist policiesracist ideasignorance/hate: this is the causal relationship driving America’s racial history.

Racist policies have usually sprung from economic, political, and cultural self-interests, self-interests that are constantly changing.

The principal function of racist ideas in American history has been the suppression of resistance to racist policy and its resulting racial disparities. The beneficiaries of slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration have produced racist ideas of Black people being best suited for or deserving of the confines of slavery, segregation, or the jail cell. Consumers of these racist ideas have been led to believe there is something wrong with Black people, and not the policies that have enslaved, oppressed, and confined so many Black people. Racist ideas have done their job on us. We have a hard time recognizing that racist policy is the cause of racial disparities in this

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.

I am saying that there is nothing wrong with Black people as a group, or with any other racial group. That is what it truly means to be antiracist: to think there is nothing wrong with Black people, to think that racial groups are equals.

But after all these centuries trying, no one has proven that a racial group has a monopoly on any human trait or gene.

Under our different-looking hair and skin, doctors cannot tell the difference between our bodies, our brains, or the blood that runs in our veins. All cultures, in all their differences, are on the same level. Black Americans’ history of oppression has made Black opportunities—not Black people—inferior.

When you truly recognize that the racial groups are equals, then you also recognize that racial disparities must...

Curse theory was the first known segregationist idea. This theory suggested that Black people were naturally and permanently inferior, and totally incapable of becoming White. Climate theory was the first known assimilationist idea, suggesting that 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.

In 1662, Virginia lawmen plugged one of Key’s freedom loopholes to resolve “doubts [that] have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or free.”

With this law in place, White enslavers could now reap financial reward from relations “upon a negro woman.” But they wanted to prevent the limited number of White women from engaging in similar interracial relations (as their biracial babies would become free).

In 1664, Maryland legislators declared it a “disgrace to our Nation” when “English women… intermarry with Negro slaves.” By the end of the century, Maryland and Virginia legislators had enacted severe penalties for White women in relationships with Native or African men.

In this way, heterosexual White men freed themselves, through racist laws, to engage in sexua...

Already, the American mind was accomplishing that indispensable intellectual activity of someone consumed with racist ideas: individualizing White negativity and generalizing Black negativity. Negative behavior by any Black person became proof of what was wrong with Black people, while negative behavior by any White person only proved what was wrong with that person.

Baxter naïvely believed there existed in bulk in the human trade what he called a “voluntary-slave.” He tried to will into existence a world where loving masters bought voluntary slaves to save their souls.

But even that dream world was seen as a threat by enslavers. American enslavers were still afraid to baptize Africans, because enslaved Christians, like Elizabeth Key, could sue for their freedom.

The colonies moved quickly to legalize the proselytizing demands of missionaries like Richard Baxter, and to hush the freedom cries from enslaved Christians. In 1667, Virginia decreed that “the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his...

In 1667, the English Parliament empowered enslavers to control the “wild, barbarous and savage nature” of enslaved Africans “with strict severity.” And in 1669, the personal physician of Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, one of the Lords Proprietor of the Province of Carolina, in his draft of the original Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, awarded the founding planters of the province “absolute power and authority” over enslaved Africans.

pissing me off

Ever since Europeans had laid eyes on Indigenous Americans in 1492, a people unmentioned in the Bible, they had started questioning the biblical creation story. Some speculated that Indigenous people had to have descended from “a different Adam.” By the end of the sixteenth century, European thinkers had added African people to the list of species descended from a different Adam.

In early August 1676, Increase Mather—the theological scion of New England with his father dead—implored God from sunup to sundown to cut down King Philip, also known as Metacomet, the Wampanoag sachem and war leader of a coalition of Wampanoags, Narragansetts, Nipmucs, Pocumtucks, and other Native groups in the Connecticut River Valley.

Metacomet was killed, more or less ending the war. Puritans cut up his body as if it were a hog’s. A nearly fourteen-year-old Cotton Mather detached Metacomet’s jaw from his skull. Puritans then paraded Metacomet’s remains around Plymouth.

Down in Virginia, Governor George Berkeley was trying to avoid a totally different war with neighboring Native Americans, in part to avoid disrupting his profitable fur trade. Twenty-nine-year-old frontier planter Nathaniel Bacon had other plans. The racial laws passed in the 1660s had done little to diminish class conflict and the appetite for Native land. Around April 1676, Bacon mobilized a force of frontier White laborers to redirect their anger from White elites to Susquehannocks. Bacon’s mind game worked.

But Bacon was not so easily stopped. By summer, the anti-Native war had quickly become a civil war—or, to some, a class war—with Bacon and his supporters rebelling against Berkeley, and Berkeley hiring a militia of mercenaries.

By September 1676, a defiant Bacon had “proclaimed liberty to all Servants and Negroes.” For Governor Berkeley’s wealthy White inner circle, poor White people and enslaved Africans joining hands presaged the apocalypse.

Rich White planters learned from Bacon’s Rebellion that poor White people had to be forever separated from enslaved Black people. They divided and conquered by creating more White privileges. In 1680, legislators pardoned the rebels, but they prescribed thirty lashes for any enslaved African who lifted a hand “against any Christian” (Christian now meant White). All White people now wielded absolute power to abuse any African person.

Back in the summer of 1674, Increase Mather crossed the Charles River to present an eleven-year-old Cotton Mather for admission as the youngest student in Harvard’s history. He was already well known in New England as an intellectual prodigy—or, from the Puritans’ standpoint, the chosen one.

The fifteen-year-old Cotton Mather graduated into an English world that was developing more and more sophisticated racist ideas to rationalize the enslavement of African people. English scientists and colonizers seemed to be trading theories.

Around 1677, Royal Society economist William Petty drafted a hierarchical “Scale” of humanity, locating the “Guinea Negroes” at the bottom. Middle Europeans, he wrote, differed from Africans “in their natural manners, and in the internal qualities of their minds.”

Just sick, I feel like racism is started for profits and egos

It sat in the conceptual core of climate theory: Africans darkened by the sun could return to their original White complexion by living in cooler Europe.

WOW LOL

In advancing White originality and normality, Bernier positioned the “first” race as the “yardstick against which the others are measured,” as historian Siep Stuurman later explained. Bernier simultaneously veiled and normalized, screened and standardized White people—and he eroticized African women. “Those cherry-red lips, those ivory teeth, those large lively eyes… that bosom and the rest,” Bernier marveled. “I dare say there is no more delightful spectacle in the world.”

It was a subtle contradiction—the diminution of Black people’s total (as racial) humanity in the midst of the elevation of their sexual humanity, a contradiction...

The souls of African people were equal to those of the Puritans: they were White and good.

Mather wrote of all humans having an unblemished White soul the same year John Locke declared all unblemished minds to be White.

In a letter to Richards on May 31, 1692, Mather expressed his support for capital punishment. Ten days later the Richards court executed Bridget Bishop, the first of more than twenty accused witches to die.

The fervor over witches soon died down. But even after Massachusetts authorities apologized, reversed the convictions, and provided reparations in the early 1700s, Mather never stopped defending the Salem witch trials, because he never stopped defending the religious, class, gender, and racial hierarchies reinforced by the trials. These hierarchies benefited elites like him, or, as he continued to preach, they were in accord with the law of God.

And Cotton Mather viewed himself—or presented himself—as the defender of God’s law, the crucifier of any non-Puritan, African, Native, poor person, or woman who defied God’s law by not following the rules of submission.

This line of thinking became Mather’s everlasting justification of social hierarchy: the ambitious lowly resembled Satan; his kind of elites resembled God.