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

by Ibram X. Kendi

THE TITLE STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING comes from a speech that Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis gave on the floor of the US Senate on April 12, 1860. This future president of the Confederacy objected to a bill funding Black education in Washington, DC. “This Government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes,” but “by white men for white men,” Davis lectured his colleagues. The bill was based on the false notion of racial equality, he declared. The “inequality of the white and black races” was “stamped from the beginning.”3 It

Hate and ignorance have not driven the history of racist ideas in America. Racist policies have driven the history of racist ideas in America.

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

The beneficiaries of slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration have produced racist ideas of Black people being best suited for or deserving of the confines of slavery, segregation, or the jail cell. 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.

Fooled by racist ideas, I did not fully realize that the only thing wrong with Black people is that we think something is wrong with Black people. I did not fully realize that the only thing extraordinary about White people is that they think something is extraordinary about White people.

Aristotle, who lived from 384 to 322 BCE, concocted a climate theory to justify Greek superiority, saying that extreme hot or cold climates produced intellectually, physically, and morally inferior people who were ugly and lacked the capacity for freedom and self-government.

Ibn Khaldun’s day, most of the captives sold in Western Europe were Eastern Europeans who had been seized by Turkish raiders from areas around the Black Sea. So many of the seized captives were “Slavs” that the ethnic term became the root word for “slave” in most Western European languages.

building up Prince Henry’s evangelical justification for enslaving Africans, Zurara reduced these captives to barbarians who desperately needed not only religious but also civil salvation.

Las Casas and company birthed twins—racist twins that some Native Americans and Africans took in: the myth of the physically strong, beastly African, and the myth of the physically weak Native American who easily died from the strain of hard labor.10

Curse theorists were the first known segregationists. They believed that Black people were naturally and permanently inferior, and totally incapable of becoming White. Climate theorists were the first known assimilationists, believing Black people had been nurtured by the hot sun into a temporary inferiority, but were capable of becoming White if they moved to a cooler climate.

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. Black

In 1679, the British Board of Trade approved Barbados’s brutally racist slave codes, which were securing the investments of traders and planters, and then produced a racist idea to justify the approval: Africans were “a brutish sort of People.”14 In

It was a subtle contradiction—the diminution of Black people’s total (as racial) humanity in the midst of the elevation of their sexual humanity, a contradiction inherent in much of anti-Black racism. Bernier valued rationality, using it as a yardstick of superiority, irrespective of physicality. Superior physicality related Africans to those creatures containing the utmost physical prowess—animals.

Cotton Mather had built on Richard Baxter’s theological race concept. The souls of African people were equal to those of the Puritans: they were White and good.3

Mather never stopped defending the Salem witch trials, because he never stopped defending the religious, class, slaveholding, gender, and racial hierarchies reinforced by the trials. These hierarchies benefited elites like him, or, as he continued to preach, they were in accord with the law of God.

In A Good Master Well Served (1696), he presumed that nature had created “a conjugal society” between husband and wife; a “Parental Society” between parent and child; and, “lowest of all,” a “herile society” between master and servant. Society, he said, became destabilized when children, women, and servants refused to accept their station.

He pointed out that the so-called just wars between Africans were actually instigated by European slave-traders drumming up demand for captives.4

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.”

On December 13, 1706, Mather believed wholeheartedly that God had rewarded him for writing The Negro Christianized. Members of Mather’s church—“without any Application of mine to them for such a Thing”—spent forty or fifty pounds on “a very likely Slave,” he happily noted in his diary. New England churches routinely gifted captives to ministers. Mather named “it” Onesimus, after St. Paul’s adopted son, a converted runaway. Mather kept a close racist eye on Onesimus, constantly suspecting him of thievery.8

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

If they did not clamor for freedom, then their obedience showed they were naturally beasts of burden. If they nonviolently resisted enslavement, they were brutalized. If they killed for their freedom, they were barbaric murderers.

Thomas Jefferson only really handed revolutionary license to his band of wealthy, White, male revolutionaries. He criminalized runaways in the Declaration of Independence, and he silenced women.

This hodgepodge of thoughts was classic Jefferson, classically both antislavery and anti-abolition—with a segregationist dose of nature’s distinctions, and an antiracist dose acknowledging White prejudice and discrimination.9

The ambitious politician, maybe fearful of alienating potential friends, maybe torn between Enlightenment antislavery and American proslavery, maybe honestly unsure, did not pick sides between polygenesists and monogenesists, between segregationists and assimilationists, between slavery and freedom. But he did pick the side of racism.15 IN

Positive Black behavior, abolitionist strategists held, undermined racist ideas, and negative Black behavior confirmed them.

This strategy to undermine racist ideas was actually based on a racist idea: “negative” Black behavior, said that idea, was partially or totally responsible for the existence and persistence of racist ideas.

Jefferson and like-minded planters of the Upper South started deliberately “breeding” captives to supply the Deep South’s demand. “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man on the farm,” Jefferson once explained to a friend.

trying to establish colonies in order to exploit Africa’s resources and bodies more systematically and efficiently. This new racist drive required racist ideas to make sense of it, and Hegel’s pontifications about backward Africans arrived right on time. Racist ideas always seemed to arrive right on time to dress up the ugly economic and political exploitation of African people. Ironically,

When Blacks were seen as simply people—a collection of imperfect individuals, equal to the imperfect collection of individuals with white skins—then Blacks’ imperfect behavior became irrelevant. Discrimination was the social problem: the cause of the racial disparities between two equal collections of individuals.12

Racist policies forcing free Blacks into menial jobs were being defended by racist claims that lazy and unskilled Black people were best for those positions.

Calhoun went on to explain that it was both a positive good for society and a positive good for subordinate Black people. Slavery, Calhoun suggested, was racial progress.3 In

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.

But antiracists had to contend against both powerful antislavery assimilationists and the even more powerful proslavery segregationists.

he “looked in vain, during twenty years for a solitary exception” to Jefferson’s verdict of never finding “a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narrative.” This is “something extraordinary,” said Garrison sardonically, “that Jefferson should beget so many stupid children.”20

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.

No one ever revealed the exact terms of the “Bargain of 1877.” But Democrats handed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency, while Hayes ended Reconstruction for the Democrats. Hayes recognized the stolen Democratic governments in Louisiana and South Carolina. He withdrew federal troops from the South and used those troops to crush the Great Strike of 1877.

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.24

“THE SLAVE WENT FREE; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again towards slavery.” W. E. B. Du Bois had lived almost seven decades before he gave this classic summation of the Reconstruction era.

Tillman showed in this statement the real purpose of lynchings: if racist ideas won’t subdue Blacks, then violence will. Roosevelt learned his lesson, and he never invited a Black person to the President’s House again.

The film revitalized the Ku Klux Klan, drawing millions of Americans by the 1920s into the club that terrorized Jews, immigrants, socialists, Catholics, and Blacks.

Angry at its terrible lies, Black communities everywhere protested The Birth of a Nation.

“Great Migration.” In the first mass antiracist movement of the twentieth century, migrants eschewed beliefs in the New South’s racial progress, in the notion of Jim Crow being better than slavery, and in the claim that Blacks’ political-economic plight was their fault.

“The highest aim of human existence is… the conservation of race,” Hitler famously wrote. The Nazi czar later thanked Grant for writing The Passing of the Great Race, which Hitler called “my Bible.”7

Eugenicist ideas also became part of the fledgling discipline of psychology and the basis of newly minted standardized intelligence tests.

To Wilson’s racist Americans, there was nothing more dangerous than a self-respecting Black person with antiracist expectations of immediate equality, rather than the gradual equality of assimilationists or the permanent inequality of segregationists.

Assimilationists often erroneously confused Garvey’s separatists, who actually believed in separate but equal, with segregationists, who really believed in separate but unequal. It was Garvey’s assimilationist opponents who were constructing Black integration into White spaces as progress.

Separatist organizing can be racist (and when it is, it turns into segregation), if the emphasis is on excluding inferior peoples. Interracial organizing can be racist (and when it is, it turns into assimilation), if the emphasis is on elevating inferior Blacks by putting them under the auspices of superior Whites.

The Niggerati was quite possibly the first known fully antiracist intellectual and artistic group in American history.

The Cold War between capitalism and communism to win the economic and political allegiances of decolonizing nations, and of their markets and resources, had begun.

antiracist concept that “all cultures must be judged in relation to their own history… and definitely not by the arbitrary standard of any single culture.”