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

by Ibram X. Kendi

If any group should be characterized as “lazy,” it was the enslavers, who had “lived in idleness all their lives on stolen labor,” as one free Black woman wrote to Lincoln during the Civil War.

Johnson came from a Democratic Party busily shouting that to give Black people voting rights would result in “nigger domination.”

If there was any semblance of equal opportunity, these racist thinkers argued, then Black people would become dominators and White people would suffer.

This was—and still is—the racist folklore of reverse discrimination. Andrew Johnson crafted...

Klansmen glorified White womanhood as the epitome of honor and purity (and asexuality) and demeaned Black womanhood as the epitome of immorality and filth (and hypersexuality).

Klansmen religiously believed that Black people possessed supernatural sexual powers, and this belief fueled their sexual attraction to Black women and their fear of White women being attracted to Black men.

It became almost standard operating procedure to justify Klan terrorism by maintaining that southern White supremacy was necessary to defend the purity of White women. Black women’s bodies, in contrast, were regarded as a “training ground” for White men, or a stabilizing “safety valve” for White men’s “sexual energies” that allowed the veneration of the asexual pureness of White womanhood to continue.

A murderer of Black people said that Black people possessed “little regard for human life.”

Cesare Lombroso “proved” in 1876 that men of color loved to kill, “mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood.” His Criminal Man gave birth to the discipline of criminology in 1876.

So many thing's tied to racism. The Circus (barnes and bailey) the gynecology, now criminology

He believed that born criminals emitted physical signs that could be studied, measured, and quantified, and that the “inability to blush”—and therefore, dark skin—had “always been considered the accompaniment of crime.”

Italian law professor Raffaele Garofalo, invented the term “criminology” (criminologia) in 1885.

To intimidate and reassert their control over Black people and White women, White male redeemers terrorized through lynching in the 1880s.

Someone was lynched, on average, every four days from 1889 to 1929.

Often justifying the ritualistic slaughters on a false rumor that the victim had raped a White woman, White men, women, and children gathered to watch the torture, killing, and dismemberment of hu...

And behind these racist ideas were powerful White men, striving by word and deed to regain absolute political, economic, and cultural control of the South.

The day after Republicans used Black votes to regain the House in the 1906 midterm elections, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable discharge (and loss of pensions) of 167 Black soldiers in the 25th Infantry Regiment, a Black unit that had been a huge source of Black pride.

It is hard to imagine a more famous fictional character during the twentieth century than Tarzan—and it is hard to imagine a more racist plot than what Burroughs wrote up in the Tarzan adventure series books, which he was writing and publishing almost until his death in 1950.

The 1915 movie was Hollywood’s first feature-length studio production, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, based on Thomas Dixon’s popular novel The Clansman. The silent film signaled the birth of Hollywood and of the motion-picture industry in the United States.

There are so many things tied to racism

Film became the newest visual medium by which to circulate racist ideas, eclipsing the fading minstrel shows.

By January 1916, more than 3 million people had viewed the film in New York alone. 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 organization that terrorized Jews, immigrants, socialists, Catholics, and Blacks.

During the Great War, Black people once again used their legs as activism, escaping from rural towns to southern cities, from southern cities to border-state cities, and from border-state cities to northern cities in what became known as the “Great Migration.”

He probably heard the circulating Black children’s rhyme: “If you’re white, you’re right / If you’re yellow, you’re mellow / If you’re brown, stick around / If you’re black, get back.”

A cadre of Harlem’s young and talented Black artists refused to take direction from W. E. B. Du Bois.

“Niggerati” in 1926, clearly showing little interest in assimilation or in media suasion.

The Niggerati was quite possibly the first known fully antiracist intellectual and artistic group in American history. Its members rejected class racism, cultural racism, historical racism, gender racism, and even queer racism, as some members were gay or bisexual.

So in 1932, the US Public Health Service began its “Study of Syphilis in the Untreated Negro Male.” Government researchers promised free medical care to six hundred syphilis-infected sharecroppers around Tuskegee, Alabama. They secretly withheld treatment from these men and waited for their deaths so they could perform autopsies.

King Kong was nothing but a remake of The Birth of a Nation, set in the island scenery of Tarzan, and then New York. But King Kong did not invite the controversy of The Birth of a Nation.

Everything is tied to racism wth

The filmmakers had veiled the physically powerful Black man by casting him as the physically powerful ape. In both films, the Negro-Ape terrorizes White people, tries to destroy White civilization, and pursues a White woman before a dramatic climax—the lynching of the Negro-Ape.

Almost everyone still believed that different skin colors actually meant something more than different skin colors.

But it was those very Nazi doctrines—and the genocide of Jews, which began in 1938—that were enraging White intellectuals and turning them off from Jim Crow. In December 1938, in a unanimous resolution, the American Anthropological Association denounced biological racist ideas.

anthropologist Ruth Benedict, a student of Franz Boas, dropped the term “racism” into the national vocabulary. “Racism is an unproved assumption of the biological and perpetual superiority of one human group over another,” she wrote in Race: Science and Politics (1940).

Tarzan became the primary medium through which Americans learned about Africa, Gone with the Wind became the primary medium through which they learned about slavery. The only problem was that, in both cases, the depictions were woefully incorrect.

The loyal, loving Mammy in Gone with the Wind, one of the most adored characters in Hollywood history, was played by the actress Hattie McDaniel. “By enjoying her servitude, [Mammy] acts as a healing salve for a nation ruptured by the sins of racism,”

After Hattie McDaniel, Hollywood producers loved to wrap bandanas around dark and hefty mammies in a parade of films in the mid-twentieth century. The stereotype masculinized Black femininity while emphasizing the ultrafemininity of the Black characters’ White counterparts on the screen. Light-skinned Black women saw either exotic or tragic mulattoes on movie screens. These characters failed to be assimilated into White womanhood, and failed to seduce White men.

After the United States entered World War II in 1942,

On June 6, 1947, these two commanding scholars published their groundbreaking article in the all-powerful journal Science. “Race differences,” Dobzhansky and Montagu wrote, “arise chiefly because of the differential action of natural selection on geographically separate populations.”

They rejected eugenic ideas of fixed races, fixed racial traits, and a fixed racial hierarchy.

through two evolutionary processes: one biological, one cultural. It was not nature or nurture distinguishing humans, but nature and nurture. This formulation became known as the dual-evol...

It was an area of growth that sometimes complemented the growth of molecular biology, particularly after American James Watson and Brits Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin discovered th...

Segregationist and assimilationist scholars still found ways to adapt dual-evolution theory to suit t...

Segregationist scholars could argue that African populations contained the lowest frequencies of “good” genes. Assimilationist scholars could argue that European populations had created the most complex and sophisticated ...

“Truman Doctrine” that he presented to Congress on March 12, 1947.

He branded the United States the leader of the free world and the Soviet Union the leader of the unfree world. “The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms,” Truman proclaimed.

Labeling itself the leader of the free world opened the United States up to criticism about its myriad unfree racist policies (not to mention its unfree labor, s...

Protecting the freedom brand of the United States became more important for northern politicians than sectional unity and securing segregationist votes.

and the welfare benefits of the GI Bill, passed in 1944. It was the most wide-ranging set of welfare benefits ever offered by the federal government in a single bill.

More than 200,000 war veterans used the bill’s benefits to buy a farm or start a business, 5 million purchased new homes, and almost 10 million went to college. 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 racist practices that reduced or denied them the benefits.

Deal and suburban housing construction (in developments that found legal ways to keep Black homebuyers out), the GI Bill gave birth to the White middle class and widened the economic gap between the races, a growing d...

While urban Black neighborhoods in postwar America became the national symbol of poverty and violence, the suburban White neighborhoods, containing suburban White houses, wrapped by white picket fences, lodging happy White fa...

The most notorious victim of what was to be called “massive resistance” to desegregation was fourteen-year-old Emmett Till on August 28, 1955.