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

by Ibram X. Kendi

passed the most racist bill of the decade. On October 27, 1986, Reagan, with “great pleasure,” signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, supported by both Republicans and Democrats.

While the Anti-Drug Abuse Act prescribed a minimum five-year sentence for a dealer or user caught with five grams of crack, the amount typically handled by Black people and poor people, the mostly White and rich users and dealers of powder cocaine—who operated in neighborhoods with fewer police—had to be caught with five hundred grams to receive the same five-year minimum sentence.

The bipartisan act led to the mass incarceration of Americans. The incarcerated population quadrupled between 1980 and 2000 due entirely to stiffer sentencing policies, not more harm. Between 1985 and 2000, convictions for drug-related activities accounted for two-thirds of the spike in the incarcerated population.

By 2000, Black people comprised 62.7 percent and White people 36.7 percent of all people convicted of drug-related activities in state prisons—and not because they were selling or using more drugs.

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.

Even the statistics suggesting that more violence—especially on innocent victims—was occurring in urban Black neighborhoods were based on a racist statistical method rather than reality. Drunk drivers, who routinely kill more people than violent urban Black people, were not regarded as violent criminals in such studies, and 78 percent of arrested drunk drivers in 1990 were White males.

This racist drug of the declining Black family was as addicting to consumers of all races as crack—and as addicting as the myth of the dangerous Black neighborhood.

The president endorsed a federal “three strikes and you’re out” law, bringing on wild applause from both Democrats and Republicans. Heeding Clinton’s urging, Republicans and New Democrats sent him a $30 billion bill for his signature in August 1994.

The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, the largest such bill in US history, created dozens of new federal capital crimes, instituted life sentences for certain three-time repeaters, and provided billions for the expansion of police forces and prisons—and the net effect would be the largest increase of the incarcerated population in US history, mostly for nonviolent drug-related activities.

Clinton fulfilled his campaign vow that no Republican would be tougher on “crime” than him—and “crime” in America was colored Black.

D’Souza’s writing and speaking and marketing talents—and powerful backers—he had managed to get many Americans to ponder the issues discussed in The End of Racism. But racism was everywhere in 1995 for people who cared enough to open their eyes and look at the policies, disparities, and rhetoric all around them.

In March, Halle Berry starred in Losing Isaiah as the spiraling debate over interracial adoptions hit theaters. The film was about a Black mother on crack whose baby is adopted by a White woman. And while the idea of Black parents adopting a White child was beyond the racist imagination, assimilationist reformers were not only encouraging White savior parents to adopt Black children, but claiming that Black children would be better off in White homes than they were in Black homes.

When asked in 1995 to “close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me,” 95 percent of the respondents described a Black face, despite Black faces constituting a mere 15 percent of drug users according to a study published that year.

As Louis Farrakhan thundered at the climax of his two-and-a-half-hour oration, “The real evil in America is not white flesh or black flesh. The real evil in America is the idea that undergirds the setup of the Western world. And that idea is called white supremacy.”

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 squares in 1997.

Racist Americans in the United States were embracing diversity and multiculturalism in name only, if at all. In practice they...

Ebonics had formed from the trees of African languages and modern English, just as modern English had formed from the trees of the Latin, Greek, and Germanic languages. Ebonics was no more “broken” or “nonstandard” English than English was “broken” or “nonstandard” German, Greek, or Latin.

According to Obama, this “legacy of defeat” explained why “young men and, increasingly, young women” were “standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons.”

Obama added his “legacy of defeat” theory to the many racist folk theories circulating in classrooms and around dinner tables and in barbershops about slavery and ongoing oppression—especially its trauma—making Black people biologically, psychologically, culturally, or morally inferior.

Over the years, people had been using these folk theories—giving them names such as “post-traumatic slave syndrome,” or the “slavery-hypertension thesis,” or the “Hood Disease”—to walk away from the complete truth that racist power and policy had resulted in inferior opportunities and bank accounts for Black people, and not in an inferior racial group.