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

by Ibram X. Kendi

By racial disparities, I mean how racial groups are not statistically represented according to their populations. If Black people make up 13.2 percent of the US population, then Black people should make up somewhere close to 13 percent of the Americans killed by the police, somewhere close to 13 percent of the Americans sitting in prisons, somewhere close to owning 13 percent of US wealth.

For nearly six centuries, antiracist ideas have been pitted against two kinds of racist ideas: segregationist and assimilationist.

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

Antiracists have long argued that racial discrimination was stamped from the beginning of America, which explains why racial disparities have existed and persisted. Unlike segregationists and assimilationists, antiracists have recognized that the different skin colors, hair textures, behaviors, and cultural ways of Blacks and Whites are on the same level, are equal in all their divergences. As the legendary Black lesbian poet Audre Lorde lectured in 1980: “We have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals.”

All these self-serving efforts by powerful factions to define their racist rhetoric as nonracist has left Americans thoroughly divided over, and ignorant of, what racist ideas truly are. It has all allowed Americans who think something is wrong with Black people to believe, somehow, that they are not racists. But to say something is wrong with a group is to say something is inferior about that group.

My definition of a racist idea is a simple one: it is any concept that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group in any way.

When we look back on our history, we often wonder why so many Americans did not resist slave trading, enslaving, segregating, or now, mass incarcerating. The reason is, again, racist ideas. The principal function of racist ideas in American history has been the suppression of resistance to racial discrimination and its resulting racial disparities. 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.

Anyone—Whites, Latina/os, Blacks, Asians, Native Americans—anyone can express the idea that Black people are inferior, that something is wrong with Black people. Anyone can believe both racist and antiracist ideas, that certain things are wrong with Black people and other things are equal.

Under our different-looking hair and skin, doctors cannot tell the difference between our bodies, our brains, or the blood that runs in our veins. All cultures, in all their behavioral differences, are on the same level.

In studying Aristotle’s philosophy, Puritans learned rationales for human hierarchy, and they began to believe that some groups were superior to other groups. In Aristotle’s case, ancient Greeks were superior to all non-Greeks. But Puritans believed they were superior to Native Americans, the African people, and even Anglicans—that is, all non-Puritans.

In 1466, a Czech traveler noticed that the king of Portugal was making more selling captives to foreigners “than from all the taxes levied on the entire kingdom.”

Almost from Columbus’s arrival, Spanish colonists began to degrade and enslave the indigenous American peoples, naming them negros da terra (Blacks from the land), transferring their racist constructions of African people onto Native Americans. Over the years that followed, they used the force of the gun and the Bible in one of the most frightful and sudden massacres in human history.

And this stratification became clear in Virginia’s first judicial decision explicitly referring to race. The court ordered a White man in 1630 “to be soundly whipt before an assembly of negroes & others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and the shame of Christianity by defiling his body in lying with a negro.” The court contrasted the polluted Black woman and the pure White woman, with whom he could lie without defiling his body. It was the first recorded instance of gender racism in America, of considering the body of the Black woman to be a tainted object that could defile a White man upon contact.

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.

Baxter naïvely believed there existed in bulk in the slave trade what he called a “voluntary-slave.” He tried to will into existence a world where loving masters bought voluntary slaves to save their souls.

Not many Englishmen were more knowledgeable—or less compassionate—than Locke about British colonialism and slavery. “You should feel nothing at all of others’ misfortune,” Locke advised a friend in 1670.4

Ever since Europeans had laid eyes on Native Americans in 1492, a people unmentioned in the Bible, they had started questioning the biblical creation story. Some speculated that Native Americans had to have descended from “a different Adam.” By the end of the sixteenth century, European thinkers had added African people to the list of species descended from a different Adam. In 1616, Italian freethinker Lucilio Vanini said—as Locke suggested later—that Ethiopians and apes must have the same ancestry, distinct from Europeans.

The 1688 Germantown Petition Against Slavery was the inaugural antiracist tract among European settlers in colonial America. Beginning with this piece, the Golden Rule would forever inspire the cause of White antiracists. Antiracists of all races—whether out of altruism or intelligent self-interest—would always recognize that preserving racial hierarchy simultaneously preserves ethnic, gender, class, sexual, age, and religious hierarchies. Human hierarchies of any kind, they understood, would do little more than oppress all of humanity.

Rich planters learned from Bacon’s Rebellion that poor Whites had to be forever separated from enslaved Blacks. They divided and conquered by creating more White privileges.

Don’t worry about baptism leading to freedom. The “Law of Christianity… allows Slavery,” he resolved. He cited the writings of other Puritan theologians as well as St. Paul.

From their arrival around 1619, African people had illegally resisted legal slavery. They had thus been stamped from the beginning as criminals. In all of the fifty suspected or actual slave revolts reported in newspapers during the American colonial era, resisting Africans were nearly always cast as violent criminals, not people reacting to enslavers’ regular brutality, or pressing for the most basic human desire: freedom.

No matter what African people did, they were barbaric beasts or brutalized like beasts. 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.

Racist European scientists at first refused to recognize that African physicians could have made such advances. Indeed, it would take several decades and many more deaths before British physician Edward Jenner, the so-called father of immunology, validated inoculation.

Minister Hugh Jones, a William & Mary professor, published his highly influential Present State of Virginia in 1724. “Christianity,” Jones wrote, “encourages and orders” African people “to become more humble and better servants.” They should not learn to read and write, though. They were “by Nature cut out for hard Labour and Fatigue.” In his stunningly popular 1722 collection of sermons, James Blair proclaimed that the Golden Rule did not suggest equality between “superiors and inferiors.”

They wanted evangelists preaching a racist Christianity for submission, not an antiracist Christianity for liberation.

Making hierarchies of Black ethnic groups within the African kingdom can be termed ethnic racism, because it is at the intersection of ethnocentric and racist ideas, while making hierarchies pitting all Europeans over all Africans was simply racism. In the end, both classified a Black ethnic group as inferior.

Whenever a Black person or group used White people as a standard of measurement, and cast another Black person or group as inferior, it was another instance of racism.

Voltaire emerged as the eighteenth century’s chief arbiter of segregationist thought, promoting the idea that the races were fundamentally separate, that the separation was immutable, and that the inferior Black race had no capability to assimilate, to be normal, or to be civilized and White. The Enlightenment shift to secular thought had thus opened the door to the production of more segregationist ideas. And segregationist ideas of permanent Black inferiority appealed to enslavers, because they bolstered their defense of the permanent enslavement of Black people.

Buffon and Voltaire did agree on one thing: they both opposed slavery. Actually, most of the leading Enlightenment intellectuals were producers of racist ideas and abolitionist thought.

If Blacks and Whites were separate species, then their offspring would be infertile. And so the word mulatto, which came from “mule,” came into being, because mules were the infertile offspring of horses and donkeys.

No one is inferior in God’s eyes, he stressed. They had not imported Africans for their own good, as demonstrated by their constant abuse, overwork, starvation, and scarce clothing.

“Placing on Men the ignominious Title SLAVE, dressing them in uncomely Garments, keeping them to servile Labour… tends gradually to fix a Nation in the mind, that they are a Sort of People below us in Nature,” stated Woolman. But Whites should not connect slavery “with the Black Colour, and Liberty with the White,” because “where false Ideas are twisted into our Minds, it is with Difficulty we get fair disentangled.” In matters of right and equity, “the Colour of a Man avails nothing.”

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. Boston delegate John Adams sent a letter home to his wife, Abigail, to “laugh” at her strivings for women’s rights. White “children and Apprentices were disobedient” as a result of “our struggle,” Adams said the delegates had been told. “Indians slighted their guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters.” Now she had informed him that women were also “discontented.”

Jefferson unabashedly expressed his views on Black people, and in particular on potentially freed Black people. “Incorporating the [freed] blacks into the state” was out of the question, he declared. “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” 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.

Thomas Jefferson did propose a frontal attack on slavery in Notes on the State of Virginia, a plan he would endorse for the rest of his life: the mass schooling, emancipation, and colonization of Africans back to Africa. Jefferson, who enslaved Blacks at Monticello, listed “the real distinctions which nature has made,” that is, those traits that he believed made free Black incorporation into the new nation impossible.

With Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson emerged as the preeminent American authority on Black intellectual inferiority. This status would persist over the next fifty years. Jefferson did not mention the innumerable enslaved Africans who learned to be highly intelligent blacksmiths, shoemakers, bricklayers, coopers, carpenters, engineers, manufacturers, artisans, musicians, farmers, midwives, physicians, overseers, house managers, cooks, and bi- and trilingual translators—all of the workers who made his Virginia plantation and many others almost entirely self-sufficient. Jefferson had to ignore his own advertisements for skilled runaways and the many advertisements from other planters calling for the return of their valuable skilled captives, who were “remarkably smart and sensible,” and “very ingenious at any work.” One wonders whether Jefferson really believed his own words. Did Jefferson really believe Black people were smart in slavery and stupid in freedom?

The burden of race relations was placed squarely on the shoulders of Black Americans. Positive Black behavior, abolitionist strategists held, undermined racist ideas, and negative Black behavior confirmed them.

From the beginning, uplift suasion was not only racist, it was also impossible for Blacks to execute.

Uplift suasion assumed, moreover, that racist ideas were sensible and could be undone by appealing to sensibilities.

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. A year after the Slave Trade Act, a South Carolina court ruled that enslaved women had no legal claims on their children. They stood “on the same footings as other animals.”

enslavers blasted this racist mantra of contented slaves and then hypocritically demanded more weapons, more organization, and more sophisticated laws to restrain them.

The “diffusion [of enslaved Africans] over a greater surface would make them individually happier, and proportionally facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing the burden on a great number of coadjutors.” Jefferson dreamed that the vast Louisiana Territory could swallow slavery. Spread enslaved Africans out, and they will go away?

While southern colonizationists sought to remove free Blacks, northerners sought to remove all Blacks, enslaved and freed. Northern race relations had grown progressively worse since the 1790s, defying uplift suasion. Each uplifting step of Black people stoked animosity, and runaways stoked further animosity.

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. Free Blacks theorized that if they called themselves “African,” they would be giving credence to the notion that they should be sent back to Africa. Their own racist ideas were also behind the shift in terminology. They considered Africa and its cultural practices to be backward, having accepted racist notions of the continent. Some light-skinned Blacks preferred “colored,” to separate themselves from dark-skinned Negroes or Africans.19

After putting the first Black newspaper to bed, Russwurm departed for Liberia, convinced that he had given his all, but he nevertheless had lost the battle against America’s racist ideas. He failed to realize that he had contributed to the racist ideas. He had used the first African American periodical to circulate the ideas of class racism. He had said that lower-income Blacks had an inferior work ethic, inferior intelligence, and inferior morality compared to White people and Black elites like him.

Russwurm had used his paper to circulate the enslaving strategy of uplift suasion, a strategy that compelled free Blacks to worry about their every action in front of White people, just as their enslaved brethren worried about their every action in front of their enslavers.

They politely listened, but only one offered to help. The others saw nothing to gain and a lot to lose in the cause of emancipation. They feared that a push for emancipation would only cause social disorder.

he had called immediate emancipation a “wild vision.” But was it really wild? Or was it wilder to stand on some middle ground between sinful slavery and righteous freedom?

The Whites, raged Walker in the pamphlet, were “dragging us around in chains” to enrich themselves, “believing firmly” that Black people had been made to serve them forever. “Did our Creator make us to be slaves?” he asked. “Unless we try to refute Mr. Jefferson’s arguments respecting us, we will only establish them.”

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.