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

by Ibram X. Kendi

The Mid-Atlantic’s moderate climate, fertile land, and waterways for transportation were ideal for the raising of tobacco, and lots of it. Fulfilling the voracious European demand, tobacco exports from this region skyrocketed from 20,000 pounds in 1619 to 38 million in 1700. The imports of captives (and racist ideas) soared with tobacco exports. In the 1680s, enslaved Africans eclipsed White servants as the principal labor force. In

1698, the crown ended the Royal African Company’s monopoly and opened the transatlantic human trade. Purchasing enslaved Africans became the investment craze.

the enslaved population continued to rise noticeably, which led to fears of revolts and then, in 1705, to new racist codes to prevent revolts and secure human property up and down the Atlantic Coast.

over Samuel Sewall’s objections, rated Natives and Negroes with horses and hogs during a revision of the tax code.

Black property legally or illegally seized; the resulting Black destitution blamed on Black inferiority; the past racist policy or practice ignored when blame was assigned. Virginia’s 1705 code mandated that planters provide freed White servants with fifty acres of land. The resulting White prosperity was then attributed to White superiority.

Americans reading early colonial newspapers learned two recurring lessons about Black people: they could be bought like cattle, and they were dangerous criminals like those witches.

From their arrival in the Americas, African people had illegally resisted legal slavery. They had thus been stamped from the beginning as criminals.

In all of the fifty suspected or actual freedom revolts reported in newspapers during the American colonial era, resisting Africans were nearly always cast as violent criminals, not as people reacting to enslavers’ regular br...

He framed the freedom revolt a “barbarous attempt of some of their slaves.” No matter what African people did, they were called barbaric beasts or brutalized like beasts.

If they did not clamor for freedom, then their obedience showed they were naturally beasts of burden. If they nonviolently resisted enslavement, they were brutalized. If they killed for their freedom, they were barbaric murderers.

“He was perhaps the principal Ornament of this Country, and the greatest Scholar that was ever bred in it,” praised the New-England Weekly Journal on February 19, 1728, the day of Mather’s burial.

It was a fitting eulogy for the grandson of John Cotton and Richard Mather. Cotton Mather had indeed overtaken the names of his grandfathers, two ministerial giants bred in an intellectual world debating whether Africa’s heat or Ham’s curse had produced the ugly, apelike African beasts who were benefiting from enslavement.

By the time of Mather’s death in 1728, Royal Society fellows had fully constructed this White ruling standard for humanity.

Christianity, rationality, civilization, wealth, goodness, souls, beauty, light, Adam, Jesus, God, and freedom had all been framed as the dominion of White people from Europe.

The only question was whether lowly African people had the capacity to rise up and reach the standard. As America’s first articulator of assimilationist ideas, Cotton Mather preached tha...

Polygenesists questioned or rejected the reproductive capability of biracial people in order to substantiate their arguments for races being separate species.

If Black people and White people were separate species, then their offspring would be infertile. And so the word “mulatto,” which came from “mule,” came into being, because mules were the infertile offspring of horses and donkeys.

In the eighteenth century, the adage “black as the devil” battled for popularity in the English-speaking world with “God made the wh...

“Placing on Men the ignominious Title SLAVE, dressing them in uncomely Garments, keeping them to servile Labour… tends gradually to fix a Nation in the mind, that they are a Sort of People below us in Nature,” stated Woolman.

But White people should not connect slavery “with the Black Colour, and Liberty with the White,” because “where false Ideas are twisted into our Minds, it is with Difficulty we get fair disentangled.” In matters of right and equity, “the Colour of a Man avails nothing.”

Whether benevolent or not, any idea that suggests that Black people as a group are inferior, that something is wrong with Black people, is a racist idea.

One man, Samuel Johnson, had no problem calling out Americans on this hypocrisy.

Johnson did not return the admiration. He loathed Americans’ hatred of authority, their greedy rushes for wealth, their reliance on enslavement, and their way of teaching Christianity to make Black people docile. “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American,” he once said.

White people were more beautiful, he wrote, as shown by Black people’s “preference of them.” He was paraphrasing Edward Long (and John Locke) in the passage—but it was still ironic that the observation came from the pen of a man who may have already preferred a Black woman.

Jefferson did not mention the innumerable enslaved Black people who had learned to be highly intelligent blacksmiths, shoemakers, bricklayers, coopers, carpenters, engineers, manufacturers, artisans, musicians, farmers, midwives, physicians, overseers, house managers, cooks, and bi- and trilingual translators—all the workers who made his Virginia plantation and many others almost entirely self-sufficient.

One wonders whether Jefferson really believed his own words. Did Jefferson really believe Black people were smart in slavery and stupid in freedom?

Count Constantine Volney, known in France as Herodotus’s biographer, was putting his finishing touches on Travels Through Syria and Egypt when he read Notes and befriended its author.

When Volney first saw the Sphinx in Egypt, he remembered Herodotus—the foremost historian in ancient Greece—describing the “black and frizzled hair” of the ancient Egyptians.

“To the race of negroes, at present our slaves, and the objects of our extreme contempt, we owe our arts, sciences, a...

In fact, the Confederation Congress and the states made it clear that slavery would be left out of the conversation. None of the instructions given to the delegates for drawing up what the framers would peg as humankind’s ultimate constitution of freedom even mentioned slavery. It only took a few weeks, though, for slavery and its baggage to creep into the constitutional deliberations. Once opened, the question of slavery never left.

On a scorching hot June 11, 1787, South Carolina delegate John Rutledge rose at Independence Hall.

“Blacks are property, and are used [in the South]… as horses and cattle are [in the North],” Gerry blurted out.

Equating enslaved Black persons to three-fifths of all other (White) persons matched the ideology of both kinds of racist ideas.

Jefferson had always assailed interracial relationships between White women and Black or biracial men. Before arriving in Paris, he had lobbied, unsuccessfully, for Virginia’s White women to be banished (instead of merely fined) for bearing the child of a Black or biracial man.

“Amalgamation with the other colour produces degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent,” he wrote in 1814, after he had fathered several biracial children.

Like so many White men who spoke out against “amalgamation” in public, and who degraded Black or biracial women’s beauty in public, Jefferson hid his actual views in the privacy of his mind and bedroom.

Enslavers probably knew more than anyone about Black capabilities in freedom. But they only cared about Black capabilities to make them money.

From the perspective of the enslaved, the most profound instance of moral eminence was evolving in Haiti.

Jefferson learned of the Black revolt in a letter dated September 8, 1791.

As historian C. L. R. James explained in the 1930s, “They were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much.”

The murmur rang in Garrison’s ears as he walked home that night. In the Independence Day Address, he had called immediate emancipation a “wild vision.” But was it really wild? Or was it wilder to stand on some middle ground between sinful slavery and righteous freedom? “I saw there was nothing to stand upon,” Garrison admitted. In August,

P. T. Barnum, started showing off Joice Heth, who he claimed was 161 years old. What’s more, he said, she was the former mammy of George Washington.

Most of all, Heth’s dark skin made her longevity believable.

Longevity was common in Africa, the Evening Star told its readers. P. T. Barnum, of course, would go on to become one of the greatest showmen in American history, exhibiting all kinds of “freaks,” including whitening Black people.

By the fourth debate in Charleston in central Illinois, Lincoln had had enough. “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making [Black people] voters or jurors,” or politicians or marriage partners, Lincoln insisted.

“There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.

And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

oh really Lincoln

in The Origin of Species.

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He had a grander purpose: proving that all living things the world over were struggling, evolving, spreading, and facing extinction or perfection. Darwin

in 1864, Spencer coined the iconic phrase “survival of the fittest.”

So many things are tied to racism