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

by Ibram X. Kendi

The South had millions of acres of land that were worth more in purely economic terms than the almost 4 million enslaved human beings who were toiling on its plantations in 1860. With their financial investments in the institution of slavery and their dependence on its productivity, northern lenders and manufacturers were crucial sponsors of slavery. And so, they pushed their congressmen onto their compromising knees to restore the Union.

In his Inaugural Address in March, Lincoln did not object to the proposed Thirteenth Amendment, which would make slavery untouchable and potentially reunite the union. But Lincoln did swear that he would never allow the extension of slavery.

The Confederate government, he declared, rested “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government,

is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” This “great… truth,” Stephens said, was the “corner-stone” of the Confederacy.

No matter what Lincoln did not say about slavery, and no matter what blame the Democrats put on abolitionists, to Black people and to abolitionists the Civil War was over slavery and enslavers were to blame.

One out of every four of the 1.1 million men, women, and children in the contraband camps died in one of the worst public health disasters in US history.

The growing number of runaways proved that Confederate reports of contented captives was mere propaganda. This form of Black resistance—not persuasion—finally started to eradicate the racist idea of the docile Black person in northern minds.

Up north, Radical Republicans pushed through a horde of antislavery measures that southerners and their northern defenders had opposed for years. By the summer of 1862, slavery was prohibited in the territories, the ongoing transatlantic slave trade had been suppressed, the United States recognized Haiti and Liberia, abolition had arrived in Washington, DC, and the Union Army was forbidden from returning fugitives to the South. The

Fugitive Slave Act had been effectively repealed. And then came the kicker: the Second Confiscation Act, passed and sent to Lincoln on July 17. The bill declared all Confederate-owned Africans who escaped to Union lines or who resided in territories occupied by the Union to be “forever free of their servitude.”

The Second Confiscation Act was a turning point, setting Union policy on the road leading

to emancipation.

Congress. Lincoln had finally opened up to the idea of proclaiming emancipation because it would save the Union (not because it would save Black people).

“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” Lincoln replied in Greeley’s rival paper, Washington’s National Intelligencer. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps

to save the Union.” In the New York Tribune, rising abolitionist Wendell Phillips hammered Lincoln’s remarks as “the most disgraceful document that ever came from the head of a free people.”13

For slaveholding Union states and any rebel state wishing to return, Lincoln once again offered gradual, compensated emancipation and colonization. For those states remaining in rebellion on January 1, 1863, Lincoln proclaimed

that “all persons held as slaves… shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

Democrats mocked Lincoln for “purposefully” making “the proclamation inoperative in all places where… the slaves [were] accessible,” and operative “only where he has notoriously no power to execute it,” as the New York World put it.

Racist ideas were easy to revise, especially as the demands of discriminators changed. Democrats changed their racist ideas to properly attack Black soldiers. While before the war they had justified slavery by stressing Black male physical superiority, during the war they promoted White soldiers and stressed White male physical superiority. While before the war they had justified slavery by deeming Blacks naturally docile and well equipped to take orders, during the war they stressed that Blacks were uncontrollable brutes, arguing against the Republicans, who said that naturally docile Blacks made great soldiers. Republicans often credited superb Black performances on the battlefield to their superb submissiveness and to their excellent White commanders. Both sides used the same language, the same

racist ideas at different points, to make their case, reinforcing the language and ideas with plausible examples on the battlefield.

While Lincoln emancipated a minority of sheep, most fought off or slipped away from the Confederate wolves on their plantations on their own, and then ran to freedom on their own, and then into the Union Army on their own to put down the Confederate wolves.

Lincoln seemed to follow in the footsteps of Thomas Jefferson. Pay lip service to the cause of Black uplift, while supporting the racist policies that ensured the downfall of Black people.

Black people all over the South were saying

this to Union officials: Do not abolish slavery and leave us landless. Do not force us to work for our former masters and call that freedom. They distinguished between abolishing slavery and freeing people. You can only set us free by providing us with land to “till… by our own labor,” they declared. In offering postwar policy, Black people were rewriting what it meant to be free. And, in antiracist fashion, they were rejecting integration as a race relations strategy that involved Blacks showing Whites their equal humanity. They were rejecting uplift suasion—rejecting the job of working to undo the racist ideas of Whites by not performing stereotypes. Racist ideas, they were saying, were only in the eyes of the beholder, and only the beholders of racist ideas were responsible for their release.

But racist ideas rationalized the racist policy. White settlers on government-provided land were deemed receivers of American freedom; Black people, receivers of American handouts.

Most Republicans wanted the government to create equality before the law, with all men having the same constitutional and voting rights. After that, they believed the government was finished.

William Lloyd Garrison and so many of the abolitionists he inspired chose not to engage in the political struggle against racial discrimination. Garrison failed to realize that it was his genius that had transformed abolitionism from a complex, multi-issue political project with unclear battle lines and objectives into a simple, single-issue moral project: slavery was evil, and those racists justifying or ignoring slavery were evil, and it was the moral duty of the United States to eliminate the evil of slavery. Garrison did not use his genius again for antiracism, in declaring that racial disparities were evil, and that those racists justifying or ignoring disparities were evil, and that it was the moral duty of the United

States to eliminate the evil of racial disparities. He was too bogged down by the assimilationist idea that Black people needed to be developed by northerners.

Whether Douglass admitted it or not, some—perhaps most—Blacks did look down on poor Whites. They denigrated the Whites who did not enslave them as “White trash.” Actually, some uncorroborated reports suggest that enslaved Blacks created that term. Blacks had seen poor Whites doing the master’s dirty work, as overseers, or on slave patrols, while clinging to the stinking fallacy that the lowest of them was still better than the highest Black person. And if poor Whites were “White trash,” then what were elite Whites? Black consumers of racist ideas had come to associate Whiteness with wealth and power, and education and slaveholding. Only through the “White trash” construction could ideas of superior Whiteness be maintained, as it made invisible the majority of

White people, the millions in poverty, by saying they were not ordinary Whites: they were “White trash.” Similarly, the upwardly mobile Blacks were not really Black: they were extraordinary. At some point, racist and classist White elites started embracing the appellation to demean low-income Whites. “White trash” conveyed that White elites were the ordinary representatives of Whiteness.

If there was any semblance of equal opportunity, these racists argued, then Blacks would become dominators and Whites would suffer. This was—and still is—the racist folklore of reverse discrimination. Andrew Johnson crafted this form of racism.

By the end of the century, a color partition had emerged: light-skinned Blacks tended to attend the schools with Greco-Roman curricula, training for leadership, and darker-skinned Blacks ended up at industrial schools, training for submission.

Then again, hypocrisy had normalized in the American reform movements. Racial, gender, ethnic, and labor activists were angrily challenging the popular bigotry targeting their own groups at the same time they were happily reproducing the popular bigotry targeting

other groups. They did not realize that the racist, sexist, ethnocentric, and classist ideas were produced by some of the same powerful minds.

If it had been left up to the first generation of Black male politicians, women may have received voting rights in the 1870s. All six Black Massachusetts

legislators, and six of seven Black US representatives from South Carolina, for example, supported women’s suffrage. Susan B. Anthony may have privately realized that Black men were not “densely ignorant of every public question,” including her right to vote.

As this Black southerner knew so well, the ballot never did stop all those hooded night riders.

“There is absolutely nothing to determine the personal appearance of Jesus,” wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother. And yet Beecher included in the book five depictions of the perfect God-man named Jesus, and they all depicted a White man.

Henry Ward Beecher gave White Americans a model for embedding Whiteness into their religious worldviews of Jesus Christ without ever saying so out loud, just as southern and northern Whites were doing with their political worldviews. It went without saying for racists that White people were the best equipped to rule the United States under the heavenly guidance of the White Father and

Son.

Stuck between racist policies and ideas, sharecroppers could not win. Staying often meant servitude, but leaving meant shiftlessness.

In Boston, William Lloyd Garrison gave an Independence Day address for the ages. The shift in public opinion away from Reconstruction was

the consequence of emancipating Black people as a military necessity rather than as “an act of general repentance,” he said. In his last major public speech, Garrison recognized racist ideas as the core of the problem. “We must give up the spirit of complexional caste,” Garrison declared, “or give up Christianity.”

General Butler was invoking Blacks’ natural proclivity for violence and criminality to avoid punishment for the massacre he had carried out.

The Reconstruction era—the dozen or so years

following the end of the Civil War in 1865—had been a horrific time for southern White men like Wade Hampton who were used to ruling their Black people and their women. They faced and beat back with violence and violent ideas a withering civil rights and Black empowerment movement—as well as a powerful women’s movement that failed to grab as many headlines. But their supposed underlings did not stop rebelling after the fall of Reconstruction. To intimidate and reassert their control over rebellious Blacks and White women, White male redeemers took up lynching in the 1880s. Someone was lynched, on average, every four days from 1889 to 1929. Often justifying the ritualistic slaughters on a false rumor that the victim had raped a White woman, White men, women, and children gathered to

watch the torture, killing, and dismemberment of human beings—all the while calling the victims savages. 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 an...

“Let the edict go forth, trumpet-tongued, that there shall be a speedy end put to all this bloody misrule; that the millions of loyal colored citizens at the South, now under ban and virtually disfranchised, shall be put in the safe enjoyment of their rights—shall freely vote and be fairly represented—just where they are located.

And let the rallying-cry be heard from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, ‘Liberty and equal rights for each, for all, and forever, wherever the lot of man is cast without our broad domains!’” He had hoped for immediate emancipation when all hope had been lost. He now hoped for immediate equality when all hope had been lost. The thrilling statement of hope on April 24, 1879, proved to be the last will and testament of William Lloyd Garrison. Four weeks later, he was dead.

“THE SLAVE WENT FREE; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again towards slavery.”

IN THE 1870S and 1880s, no matter what Willie and other young Blacks like him achieved in school and in life, they were not changing the minds of the discriminators. The discriminators were subscribing to Social Darwinism and to the idea that Blacks were losing the racial struggle for existence.