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

by Ibram X. Kendi

For many antiracists, the term “thug” had become “the accepted way of calling somebody the N-word nowadays.” This was how Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman explained it in early 2014 after he was subjected to the slur. When the Stanford-educated Sherman shouted into the camera, racist Americans did not see an athlete fired up minutes after his “Immaculate Deflection” that won his team the National Football Conference Championship. They saw a “thug,” like the unarmed thugs officers were killing, and the thugs who were violently rebelling in 2013 for Kimani Gray; in 2014 for Staten Island’s Eric Garner and Ferguson’s Michael Brown; and in 2015 for Baltimore’s Freddie Gray. “Thug” was one of many new acceptable ways of calling Black people inferior or “less than.” Other widely used racist slurs and phrases included “ghetto,” “minority,” “personal responsibility,” “achievement gap,” “race card,” “reverse discrimination,” “good hair,” “from the bottom,” “no good Black…,” and “you see, that’s what’s wrong with Black…”7