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

by Ibram X. Kendi

As such, assimilationists constantly encourage Black adoption of White cultural traits and/or physical ideals.

The principal function of racist ideas in American history has been the suppression of resistance to racial discrimination and its resulting racial disparities.

White people. I am not saying all individuals who happen to identify as Black (or White or Latina/o or Asian or Native American) are equal in all ways. I am saying that there is nothing wrong with Black people as a group, or with any other racial group.

Americans’ history of oppression has made Black opportunities—not Black people—inferior.

The Portuguese became the primary source of knowledge on unknown Africa and the African people for the original slave-traders and enslavers in Spain, Holland, France, and England.

Already, the American mind was accomplishing that indispensable intellectual activity of someone consumed with racist ideas: individualizing White negativity and generalizing Black negativity.

In any society, the mind “at first… is rasa tabula,” Locke famously wrote in An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. If people are born without innate intelligence, then there cannot be a natural intellectual hierarchy. But Locke’s egalitarian idea had a caveat. As Boyle and Newton painted unblemished light white, Locke more or less painted the unblemished mind white. Locke

Antiracists of all races—whether out of altruism or intelligent self-interest—would always recognize that preserving racial hierarchy simultaneously preserves ethnic, gender, class, sexual, age, and religious hierarchies. Human hierarchies of any kind, they understood, would do little more than oppress all of humanity.

Rich planters learned from Bacon’s Rebellion that poor Whites had to be forever separated from enslaved Blacks. They divided and conquered by creating more White privileges.

Poor Whites had risen into their lowly place in slave society—the armed defenders of planters—a place that would sow bitter animosity between them and enslaved Africans.

Mather never stopped defending the Salem witch trials, because he never stopped defending the religious, class, slaveholding, gender, and racial hierarchies reinforced by the trials.

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

Evoking repeatedly the term “christian white servant” and defining their rights, Virginia lawmakers fully married Whiteness and Christianity, uniting rich White enslavers and the non-slaveholding White poor.

The resulting White prosperity was then attributed to White superiority.5

No matter what African people did, they were 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.

Sharing their inoculation stories, they gave him a window into the intellectual culture of West Africa.

Dr. William Douglass concocted a conspiracy theory, saying there was a grand plot afoot among African people, who had agreed to kill their masters by convincing them to be inoculated. “There

All of Britain’s religious, political, and economic power now united to free missionaries and planters from having to free the converted, thus reinvigorating proselytizing movements and dooming calls for manumission.18

James Blair proclaimed that the Golden Rule did not suggest equality between “superiors and inferiors.” Order required hierarchy. Hierarchy required responsibility. Masters, Blair preached, were to baptize and treat their slaves kindly.

If his grandfathers consumed in England the racist idea of the African who can and should be enslaved, then Cotton Mather led the way in producing the racist idea of Christianity simultaneously subduing and uplifting the enslaved African.

As America’s first great assimilationist, Cotton Mather preached that African people could become White in their souls.

Only the poorest of African people did not wear an upper garment, but this small number became representative in the European mind.

Producers of this racist idea had to know their tales were false. But they went on producing them anyway to justify their lucrative commerce in human beings.

Enslaved Africans in North America were coming mainly from seven cultural-geopolitical regions: Angola (26 percent), Senegambia (20 percent), Nigeria (17 percent), Sierra Leone (11 percent), Ghana (11 percent), Ivory Coast (6 percent), and Benin (3 percent).

Making hierarchies of Black ethnic groups within the African kingdom can be termed ethnic racism, because it is at the intersection of ethnocentric and racist ideas,

Whenever a Black person or group used White people as a standard of measurement, and cast another Black person or group as inferior, it was another instance of racism.

The theory of separately created races was a contrast to the assimilationist idea of monogenesis, that is, of all humans as descendants of a White Adam and Eve.

Voltaire emerged as the eighteenth century’s chief arbiter of segregationist thought, promoting the idea that the races were fundamentally separate, that the separation was immutable, and that the inferior Black race had no capability to assimilate, to be normal, or to be civilized and White.

That was fine for Voltaire, who believed the natural world—including the races—to be unchangeable, even from God’s power. Buffon instead beheld an ever-changing world.

And so the word mulatto, which came from “mule,” came into being, because mules were the infertile offspring of horses and donkeys.

Phillis Wheatley,

But that seemed to be all Franklin could concede, probably recognizing that the production of racist ideas was essential to substantiating slavery.

Racists often understood this capable handful to be “extraordinary Negroes.”

Fearing Mansfield’s ruling could one day extend to the British colonies, the Somerset case prodded proslavery theorists out into the open and roused the transatlantic abolitionist movement.

Slavery was killing, torturing, raping, and exploiting people, tearing apart families, snatching precious time, and locking captives in socioeconomic desolation. The confines of enslavement were producing Black people who were intellectually, psychologically, culturally, and behaviorally different, not inferior.

The publication of her poems in September 1773, a year after slavery had been outlawed in England and a few months after Rush’s abolitionist pamphlet reached England, set off a social earthquake in London.

And there was nothing Wheatley and Rush could do to stop the production of racist proslavery ideas other than end slavery.

But the concept of different creation stories and different species started making sense to more and more people in the late eighteenth century as they tried to come to grips with racial

difference. How else could they explain such glaring differences in skin color, in culture, in wealth, and in the degree of freedom people enjoyed?

Indeed, power creates freedom, not the other way around—as the powerless are taught.

“It would be dangerous to make a frontal attack on a prejudice which is beginning to decrease,” Washington advised. Prejudice beginning to decrease in 1785? However

Dutty Boukman.

Discriminatory policies were a feature of almost every emancipation law.2

Franklin’s speech and a torrent of Quaker emancipation petitions aroused a bitter boxing match over slavery in the First US Congress. It carried on for months after Franklin’s death on April 17, 1790.

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

Thomas Jefferson, for one, did not view the Haitian Revolution in the same guise as the American or French Revolutions.

As freed Blacks proliferated in the 1790s and the number of enslaved Blacks began to decline in the North, the racial discourse shifted from the problems of enslavement to the condition and capabilities of free Blacks.

Periodically, the convention published and circulated advice tracts for free Blacks. Abolitionists urged free Blacks to attend church regularly, acquire English literacy, learn math, adopt trades, avoid vice, legally marry and maintain marriages, evade lawsuits, avoid expensive delights, abstain from noisy and disorderly conduct, always act in a civil and respectable manner, and develop habits of industry, sobriety, and frugality.

If Black people behaved admirably, abolitionists reasoned, they would be undermining justifications for slavery and proving that notions of their inferiority were wrong.9

This strategy of what can be termed uplift suasion was based on the idea that White people could be persuaded away from their racist ideas if they saw Black people improving their behavior, uplifting ...