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

by Ibram X. Kendi

it is any concept that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group in any way.

Racist policies have driven the history of racist ideas in America.

Racial discriminationracist ideasignorance/hate: this is the causal relationship driving America’s history of race relations.

Racially discriminatory policies have usually sprung from economic, political, and cultural self-interests, self-interests that are constantly changing.

Consumers of these racist ideas have been led to believe there is something wrong with Black people, and not the policies that have enslaved, oppressed, and confined so many Black people.

When you truly believe that the racial groups are equal, then you also believe that racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimination.

extreme hot or cold climates produced intellectually, physically, and morally inferior people who were ugly and lacked the capacity for freedom and self-government.

Already, the American mind was accomplishing that indispensable intellectual activity of someone consumed with racist ideas: individualizing White negativity and generalizing Black negativity. Negative behavior by any Black person became proof of what was wrong with Black people, while negative behavior by any White person only proved what was wrong with that person.

ascribed a Black face to criminality—an ascription that remains to this day.

From their arrival around 1619, African people had illegally resisted legal slavery. They had thus been stamped from the beginning as criminals.

Racist ideas clouded the discrimination, rationalized the racial disparities, defined the enslaved, as opposed to the enslavers, as the problem people.

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, while making hierarchies pitting all Europeans over all Africans was simply racism. In the end, both classified a Black ethnic group as inferior.

“Amalgamation with the other color, 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.

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 themselves from their low station in American society. The burden of race relations was placed squarely on the shoulders of Black Americans.

In slavery, both Black and White children were building a sense of self on a foundation of racist ideas.

If Blacks did not violently resist, then they were cast as naturally servile. And yet, whenever they did fight, reactionary commentators, in both North and South, classified them as barbaric animals who needed to be caged in slavery.

Racist ideas, clearly, did not generate these slave codes. Enslaving interests generated these slave codes. Racist ideas were produced to preserve the enslaving interests.

In “The Mulatto—A Hybrid,” the distinguished surgeon contended that biracial women were “bad breeders,” because they were the product of “two distinct species,” the same way the mule was “from the horse and the ass.”

“When men oppress their fellow-men, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression.”

Congress forced only one group of slaveholders to provide land to their former captives—the Confederacy’s Native American allies.

“The removal of white prejudice against the negro, depends almost entirely on the negro himself,”

the “inability to blush”—and therefore, dark skin—had “always been considered the accompaniment of crime.”

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

Hate fueled the lynching era. But behind this hatred lay racist ideas that had evolved to question Black freedoms at every stage. 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.

free Blacks were headed toward “gradual extinction,” pulled down by their natural immoralities, law-breaking, and diseases.

White life insurance companies refused to insure a supposedly dying race.

Reuter reinforced the fundamentally racist idea that biracial people were abnormal

Passing bisexuals and biracial people quietly disrupted the so-called normality of heterosexuality and racial purity.

To Wilson’s racist Americans, there was nothing more dangerous than a self-respecting Black person with antiracist expectations of immediate equality,

The study was not halted until the press exposed it in 1972.

since Blacks were still losing the race, the racial disparities and their continued losses must be their fault. Black people must be inferior, and equalizing policies—like eliminating or reducing White seniority, or instituting affirmative action policies—would be unjust and ineffective.

White people were not born racist, but that “the American political, economic and social atmosphere… automatically nourishes a racist psychology in the white man.”

“You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains[,] and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

The Voting Rights Act ended up becoming the most effective piece of antiracist legislation ever passed by the Congress of the United States of America.

“The police are the armed guardians of the social order. The blacks are the chief domestic victims of the social order,” Cleaver explained. “A conflict of interest exists, therefore, between the blacks and the police.”

“And to deny the history of a people is to deny their humanity.”

The report recommended the allocation of billions of dollars to diversify American policing, to provide new jobs, better schools, and more welfare to poor Black communities, and to eradicate housing discrimination and construct affordable, fresh, and spaced-out housing units for the millions of Black residents who had been forced to live in rat-infested and deteriorating houses and high-rise projects.

Anything created by Black people, run by Black people, and filled by Black people, they thought, must be inferior. And if it was struggling to thrive, it must be the fault of those Black people.

Four years after Regents v. Bakke, White students were two and a half times more likely than Black students to enroll in highly selective colleges and universities. By 2004, that racial disparity had doubled.

The Klan almost tripled its national membership between 1971 and 1980,

By the early 1980s, one study showed that for every White person killed by police officers, police killed twenty-two Black people.

wherever there are more police, there are more arrests, and wherever there are more arrests, people perceive there is more crime, which then justifies more police, and more arrests, and supposedly more crime.

racists assumed that Black people were actually using more drugs, dealing more in drugs, and committing more crimes of all types than White people. These false assumptions fixed the image in people’s minds of the dangerous Black inner-city neighborhood as well as the contrasting image of the safe White suburban neighborhood, a racist notion that affected so many decisions of so many Americans, from housing choices to drug policing to politics, that they cannot be quantified.

the net effect would be the largest increase of the prison population in US history, mostly on nonviolent drug offenses. Clinton fulfilled his campaign vow that no Republican would be tougher on crime than him—and crime in America was colored Black.

antiracists would stop resisting racism, and racism would then be assured, only when Americans were convinced that the age of racism was over.

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.

An antiracist America can only be guaranteed if principled antiracists are in power, and then antiracist policies become the law of the land, and then antiracist ideas become the common sense of the people, and then the antiracist common sense of the people holds those antiracist leaders and policies accountable.

There will come a time when Americans will realize that the only thing wrong with Black people is that they think something is wrong with Black people.