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

by Ibram X. Kendi

“birther theory,”

How could a Donald Trump follow Barack Obama into the presidency? How could the candidate of angry bigots, the Klan’s candidate, the stop-and-frisk candidate, the candidate of border walls, the candidate that said a Latino judge can’t be objective and that “African Americans and Hispanics” live in “hell”—how could this birther theorist follow the first Black president? How could Trump rise when Obama’s rise seemed to make it impossible?

These how could this happen questions are not shared by any Trump supporters, of course...I think they could possibly turn them and “centrists” off. The idea being that the how could this happen questions were for when a Muslim won the presidency, now it’s their turn to drive libs crazy. How could Obama lose to Romney? It must be cause all the lazy people “didn’t want to work anymore,” so they elected a Muslim socialist president. That was the reasoning I heard most.

His election neither fit the Republicans’ postracial narrative of the end of racial history

Careful, Trump voters think that the media is making up all this Trump is racist stuff.

election neither fit the arrival narrative after the 1960s nor the progressive narrative that discriminatory policies have become more covert and racist ideas have become more implicit since the 1960s. Trump’s election did not fit these historical narratives because they were grounded in political ideology—and racist ideas—not firm scholarly research.

Trump’s “election neither fit the arrival narrative after the 1960s nor the progressive narrative that discriminatory policies have become more covert and racist ideas have become more implicit since the 1960s. Trump’s election did not fit these historical narratives because they were grounded in political ideology—and racist ideas—not firm scholarly research.” So, stamped is his attempt to give readers this missing history of race.

It does not even present a story of racial progress of two steps forward—as embodied in Obama—and one step back—as embodied in Trump.

It’s not like it’s one two steps forward and one step back, for Kendi.

I saw a dual and dueling history of racial progress and the simultaneous progression of racism. I saw the antiracist force of equality and the racist force of inequality marching forward, progressing in rhetoric, in tactics, in policies.

“It does not even present a story of racial progress of two steps forward—as embodied in Obama—and one step back—as embodied in Trump.” I worry that this will be too melodramatic for some scholars. However, I think looking at How Democracies Die and Let Them Eat Tweets will support this conclusion.

The Virginia legislature also denied Blacks the ability to hold office. 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. To seal the unity (and racial loyalty), Virginia’s White lawmakers seized and sold all property owned by “any slave,” the “profit thereof applied to the use of the poor of the said parish.” The story would be told many times in American history: Black property legally or illegally seized; the resulting Black destitution blamed on Black inferiority; the past discrimination ignored when the blame was assigned.

Further developments in racism: “The Virginia legislature also denied Blacks the ability to hold office. 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. To seal the unity (and racial loyalty), Virginia’s White lawmakers seized and sold all property owned by “any slave,” the “profit thereof applied to the use of the poor of the said parish.” The story would be told many times in American history: Black property legally or illegally seized; the resulting Black destitution blamed on Black inferiority; the past discrimination ignored when the blame was assigned.”

Sharing their inoculation stories, they gave him a window into the intellectual culture of West Africa. He had trouble grasping it, instead complaining about how “brokenly and blunderingly and like Idiots they tell the Story.”13

Headline: White Men can’t listen “Sharing their inoculation stories, they gave him a window into the intellectual culture of West Africa. He had trouble grasping it, instead complaining about how “brokenly and blunderingly and like Idiots they tell the Story.”13”

Anti-inoculators like Dr. Douglass found a friendly medium in one of the colonies’ first independent newspapers, the New England Courant, launched by twenty-four-year-old James Franklin in 1721.

Anti-inoculators, much like early Anti-vaxxers, were conspiracy theorists.