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

by Ibram X. Kendi

and anti-abolition—with a segregationist dose of nature’s distinctions, and an antiracist dose acknowledging White prejudice and discrimination.

Jefferson loathed slavery almost as much as he feared losing American freedom to British banks, or losing his pampered lifestyle in Monticello. He liked and disliked both freedom and slavery, and he never divorced himself from either.

“Blacks are property, and are used [in the South]… as horses and cattle are [in the North],” Gerry stammered out. So “why should their representation be increased to the southward on account of the number of slaves, [rather] than [on the basis of] horses or oxen to the north?” Gerry looked around. Silence looked back. No one was prepared to answer the unanswerable. A vote sprung from the quietness: 9–2 in favor of the three-fifths clause. A deadlocked Massachusetts abstained. Only New Jersey and Delaware voted against Wilson’s compromise.

Both assimilationists and segregationists argued, yet with different premises and conclusions, that Black people were simultaneously human and subhuman.

Like so many men who spoke out against “amalgamation” in public, and who degraded Black or biracial women’s beauty in public, Jefferson hid his actual views in the privacy of his mind and bedroom.

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

“negative” Black behavior, said that idea, was partially or totally responsible for the existence and persistence of racist ideas. To believe that the negative ways of Black people were responsible for racist ideas was to believe that there was some truth in notions of Black inferiority. To believe that there was some truth in notions of Black inferiority was to hold racist ideas.

Uplift suasion assumed, moreover, that racist ideas were sensible and could be undone

by appealing to sensibilities.

It was the cruel illogic of racism. When Black people rose, racists either violently knocked them down or ignored them as extraordinary. When Black people were down, racists called it their natural or nurtured place, and denied any role in knocking them down in the first place.

Cotton became America’s leading export, exceeding in dollar value all exports, helping to free Americans from British banks, helping to expand the factory system in the North, and helping to power the Industrial Revolution in the United States. Cotton—more than anyone or

anything else—economically freed American enslavers from England and tightened the chains of African people in American slavery. Uplift suasion had no chance of dethroning King Cotton.

master/slave rape or intercourse seemed “natural,” and enslaving one’s children seemed normal in slaveholding America.

Master/slave sex fundamentally acknowledged the humanity of Black and biracial women, but it simultaneously reduced that humanity to their sexuality.

many Americans came to understand slavery (and its sexual politics) as an immutable fact of their lives and their economy.

And the slaveholding producers of racist ideas had convinced legions of Americans to see slavery as a necessary evil to pay off their debts and build their nation. Besides, it seemed better than the supposed horrific barbarism bound to arise, they argued, from Black freedom.

With so much money to make, antislavery and antiracist ideas were whipped to the side like antislavery, antiracist Africans.

The advance of slavery, possibly more than

the persuasive arguments of Lord Kames, Charles White, and John Augustine Smith, caused intellectuals long committed to monogenesis to start changing their views.

But at the same time, they were expressing their commitment to enslaved people and America and demanding recognition for their role in the nation’s growth. It was “the land of our nativity,” a land that had been “manured” by their “blood and sweat.” “We will never separate ourselves voluntarily from the slave population of this country,” they resolved.

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

He promoted the colonization idea, that freed Blacks be hauled away to Africa in the same manner that enslaved Blacks had been hauled to America.

Protestant organizations started mass-producing, mass-marketing, and mass-distributing images of Jesus, who was always depicted as White. Protestants saw all the aspirations of the new American identity in the White Jesus—a racist idea that proved to be in their cultural self-interest. 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.”

White prejudice and Black slavery would be eternal, and that freed Blacks must use the talents they had acquired from Whites to go back and redeem unenlightened Africa.

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.

Walker identified and decried America’s favorite racist pastime: denying Blacks access to education and jobs and then calling their resultant impoverished state “natural.”

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.

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.

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, 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 (when the rise of racist films took their place).

“We are horror-struck,” Garrison wrote of the rebellion. In America’s “fury against the revolters,”

who would remember the “wrongs” of slavery? Garrison would, and he listed them. But he could not condone the strategy of violence. He did not realize that some, if not most, enslavers would die rather than set their wealth free. Garrison pledged his undying commitment to his philosophy: that the best way to “accomplish the great work of national redemption” was “through the agency of moral power,” that is, of moral persuasion.

During the winter of 1831–1832, undercover abolitionists, powerful colonizationists, and hysterical legislators in Virginia raised their voices against slavery. In the end, proslavery legislators batted away every single antislavery measure, and ended up pushing through an even more harrowing slave code than the one that had been in place. Proslavery legislators repressed the very captives they said were docile, and restricted the education of the very people they argued could not be educated.

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

Black people, “though vastly inferior in the scale of civilization,” and though unable to work “except by compulsion,” still constituted the cheap labor force that the southern economy needed, Dew wrote.

For advocates of gradual emancipation, Garrison was a radical because of his belief in immediate emancipation, whereas Calhoun was a radical for his support of perpetual slavery. Both Garrison and Calhoun regarded the other as the fanatical Devil Incarnate, the destroyer of America, the decimator of all that was good in the world and the keeper of all that was evil. Garrison needed more courage than Calhoun. While Calhoun was the loudest voice in a national choir of public figures shouting down Garrison, Garrison was nearly alone among White public figures

shouting down Calhoun.

“There is no such thing as equality among men, nor can there be,” Colton wrote. “Neither God nor man ever instituted equality.” Science affirmed Colton’s view. There was a virtual consensus among scholars—from Cambridge in Massachusetts to Cambridge in England—that racial equality did not exist. The debate in 1839 still swirled around the origin of the races: monogenesis versus polygenesis.6

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

They continued to assert that slavery brought racial progress—almost certainly knowing that this proof was untrue. “It is too good a thing for our politicians to give [up],” a Georgia congressman reportedly confessed.

Whether enslaved or free, Black people were people. Although their enslavers tried, they had never been reduced to things. Their humanity had never been eliminated—a humanity that made them equal to people the world over, even in their chains. Douglass was and always had been a man, and he wanted to be introduced as such.

The

rapid speed of transmission and monopoly pricing encouraged shorter and simpler stories that told and did not explain—that sensationalized and did not nuance, that recycled and did not trash stereotypes or the status quo.

When Richmond’s Tredegar Iron Works placed enslaved Blacks in skilled positions to cut labor costs, White workers protested. In the only protracted urban industrial strike in the pre–Civil War South, they demanded

pay raises and the removal of “the negroes” from skilled work. If the striking ironworkers thought enslavers really cared more about racism than profit, or that they would not abandon, out of self-interest, their promotions of a unified White masculinity, then they were in for a long and tortured lesson about power and profit and propaganda. Richmond elites banded together. They viewed the anti-Black strikers as being equivalent to abolitionists because they were trying to prevent them “from making use of slave labor,” as the local newspaper cried. In the end, the White strikers were fired.

By September, Henry Clay’s Compromise of 1850 had passed. “There is… peace,” Clay happily announced. “I believe it is permanent.”27 The compromise’s signature measure, the Fugitive Slave Act, handed enslavers octopus powers, allowing their tentacles to extend to the North. The Act criminalized abettors of fugitives, provided northerners incentives to capture them, and denied captured Blacks a jury trial, opening the door to mass kidnappings. To William Lloyd Garrison, the act was “so coldblooded, so inhuman and so atrocious, that Satan himself would blush to claim paternity to

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.

Since domineering Whites made the worst slaves, they made the worst Christians. Stowe offered Christian salvation to White America through antislavery. In order to become better Christians, White people must constrain their domineering temperament and end the evil outgrowth of that temperament: slavery.

“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.