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

by Ibram X. Kendi

Black Americans’ history of oppression has made Black opportunities—not Black people—inferior.

Malachy Postlethwayt defined the British Empire as “a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power, on an African foundation.” But another foundation lay beneath that foundation: those all-important producers of racist ideas, who ensured that this magnificent superstructure would continue to seem normal to potential resisters.

Linnaeus did not seem to be part of a grandiose scheme to force-feed ethnic racism to enslaved peoples to divide and conquer them. But whenever ethnic racism did set the natural allies on American plantations apart, in the manner that racism set the natural allies in American poverty apart, enslavers hardly minded.

For Jefferson, power came before freedom. Indeed, power creates freedom, not the other way around—as the powerless are taught.