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

by Ibram X. Kendi

The burden of race relations was placed squarely on the shoulders of Black Americans. Positive Black behavior, abolitionist strategists held, undermined racist ideas...

From the beginning, uplift suasion was not only racist, it was also impossible for Blacks to execute. Free Blacks were unable to always display positive characteristics for the same reasons poor immigrants and rich planters were unable to do so: free Blacks were human and humanly flawed.

King Cotton incessantly demanded more and more to stabilize its reign: more enslaved Africans, more land, more violence, and more racist ideas.

He then listed other side effects of the skin disease: Blacks’ physical superiority, their “wooly heads,” their laziness, their hypersexuality, and their insensitivity to pain.

slave ships now traveled down American waters in a kind of “middle passage” from Virginia to New Orleans, which took as many days as the transatlantic “middle passage” had.

“I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man on the farm,” Jefferson once explained to a friend.

A year after the Slave Trade Act, a South Carolina court ruled that enslaved women had no legal claims on their children. They stood “on the same footings as other animals.”

Racist ideas always seemed to arrive right on time to dress up the ugly economic and political exploitation of African people.

Jefferson adamantly came to believe that Black freedom should not be discussed in the White halls of Congress, and that southerners should be left alone to solve the problem of slavery at their own pace, in their own way.

For Jefferson, the Missouri Question was personal. If slavery could not continue its western expansion, his finances might be affected by the decreased demand for enslaved Africans in the domestic slave trade.

“Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.

As pictures of this White Jesus started to appear, Blacks and Whites started to make connections, consciously and unconsciously, between the White God the Father, his White son Jesus, and the power and perfection of White people. “I really believed my old master was almighty God,” runaway Henry Brown admitted, “and that his son, my young master, was Jesus Christ.”17

Free Blacks remained overwhelmingly against colonization. Their resistance to the concept partly accounted for the identifier “Negro” replacing “African” in common usage in the 1820s.

Some light-skinned Blacks preferred “colored,” to separate themselves from dark-skinned Negroes or Africans.19

Russwurm had used his paper to circulate the enslaving strategy of uplift suasion, a strategy that compelled free Blacks to worry about their every action in front of White people, just as their enslaved brethren worried about their every action in front of their enslavers.23

Jefferson’s fatalism about the difficulty of solving the problem of evil slavery, and his habit of deflecting blame for it onto the British, had become entrenched across the nation.

“LOOK AT IT, again and again!”

They feared that a push for emancipation would only cause social disorder.

“No valid excuse can be given for the continuance of the evil [of slavery] a single hour,”

he had the antiracist foresight to see that racism would only end when slavery ended. Walker

if White abolitionists were not betraying White enslavers, and as if White people were more politically unified, and therefore superior politically and better able to rule. Voting patterns never did quite support complaints of Black disunity and White unity.

Maria Stewart.

When Blacks were seen as a social problem, the solution to racist ideas seemed simple. As Blacks rose, so would White opinions. When Blacks were seen as simply people—a collection of imperfect individuals, equal to the imperfect collection of individuals with white skins—then Blacks’ imperfect behavior became irrelevant. Discrimination was the social problem:

When Tennessee enslaver and war hero Andrew Jackson became the new president as the hero of democracy for White men and autocracy for others in 1829, the production and consumption of racist ideas seemed to be quickening, despite recent Black advances.

Black behavior—not the wrenching housing and economic discrimination—was blamed for these impoverished Black enclaves.

Racist policies harmed Black neighborhoods, generating racist ideas that caused people not to want to live next to Blacks, which depressed the value of Black homes, which caused people not to want to live in Black neighborhoods even more, owing to low property values.

It was in this environment of entrenched racism that America’s first minstrel shows appeared, and they began attracting large audiences of European immigrants, native Whites, and sometimes even Blacks. By 1830,

Appearing in blackface, and dressed in rags, torn shoes, and a weathered hat, Jim Crow sang and danced as a stupid, childlike, cheerful Black field hand.

blackface minstrelsy became the first American theatrical form, the incubator of the American entertainment industry. Exported to excited European audiences, minstrel shows remained mainstream in the United States until around 1920

In addition to minstrel shows and “freak” shows, a series of novels and children’s books produced racist ideas to inculcate younger and younger children.

In their totality, all these racist ideas—emanating from minstrel shows, from “freak” shows, from literature, from newspapers, and from the Democrats and Whigs—looked down upon Black people as the social problem. Garrison

With Garrison’s book in hand, abolitionists declared war on the American Colonization Society. It was an assault from which the society never recovered.

Blacks were to assume “the true dignity of meekness” in order to win over their critics.

AS ENSLAVERS CALMLY discussed profits, losses, colonization, torture techniques, and the duties of Christian masters, they felt the spring drizzle of abolitionist tracts. By the summer of 1835, it had become a downpour—there were some 20,000 tracts in July alone, and over 1 million by the year’s end.

White male gang rapes of White women began to appear around the same time as the gang assaults by White men on Black people. Both were desperate attempts to maintain White male supremacy.

Morton wanted to give scholars an objective tool for distinguishing the races: mathematical comparative anatomy.

Although most scholars made the easy, popular, professionally rewarding choice of racism, some did not. Some made the hard, unpopular choice of antiracism.

In early 1846, the newly formed Associated Press used the newly invented telegraph to become the nation’s principal filter and supplier of news.

Truth imparted a double blow in “Ain’t I a Woman”: an attack on the sexist ideas of the male disrupters, and an attack on the racist ideas of females trying to banish her. “Ain’t I a Woman” in all of my strength and power and tenderness and intelligence. “Ain’t I a Woman” in all of my dark skin. Never again would anyone enfold more seamlessly the dual challenge of antiracist feminism.2

“When men oppress their fellow-men, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression.” Douglass, amazingly, summed up the history of racist ideas in a single sentence.

There was nothing more democratic than saying that the majority, in this case the disempowered Black majority, should rule their own local communities, should have Black power. But just as sexists could only envision male or female supremacy, northern and southern racists could only envision White or Black supremacy.

If racism is eliminated, many White people in the top economic and political brackets fear that it would eliminate one of the most effective tools they have at their disposal to conquer and control and exploit not only non-Whites, but also both low-income and middle-income White people.