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

by Ibram X. Kendi

some, if not most, enslavers would die rather than set their wealth free.

Racist ideas, clearly, did not generate these slave codes. Enslaving interests generated these slave codes. Racist ideas were produced to preserve the enslaving interests.20

Impressed, the Massachusetts Antislavery Society (MAS) offered Frederick Douglass a job as a traveling speaker. Douglass then emerged as America’s newest Black exhibit. He was introduced to audiences as a “chattel,” a “thing,” a “piece of southern property,” before he shared the brutality of slavery. Though he understood the strategy of shocking White Americans into antislavery, Douglass grew to dislike the regular dehumanization. Whether enslaved or free, Black people were people. Although their enslavers tried, they had never been reduced to things. Their humanity had never been eliminated—a humanity that made them equal to people the world over, even in their chains. Douglass was and always had been a man, and he wanted to be introduced as such.

Jefferson Davis, a senator from Mississippi, presented the southern platform of unlimited states’ rights and enslavers rights to the US Senate. The South needed these resolutions to be passed if they were going to remain in the Stephen Douglas–led Democratic Party and in the Union. Davis could have easily added that southerners believed the federal government should not use its resources to assist Black people in any way. On April 12, 1860, Davis objected to appropriating funds for educating Blacks in Washington, DC. “This Government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes,” he said, but “by white men for white men.” The bill was based on the false assertion of racial equality, he stated. The “inequality of the white and black races” was “stamped from the beginning.”

the Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Stephens, responded to Lincoln’s pledge in an extemporaneous speech. 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. The speech became known as his “Cornerstone Speech.”2

The Weekly Anglo-African was right. First dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of runaways fled to Union forces in the summer of 1861. But Union soldiers enforced the Fugitive Slave Act with such an iron fist that, according to one Maryland newspaper, more runaways were returned in three months of the war “than during the whole of Mr. Buchanan’s presidential term.” Northerners listened uneasily to these reports of returning runaways side by side with reports of southern Blacks being thrust into work for the Confederate military.

The Union could confiscate such people as “contraband.” Legally, they were no longer enslaved; nor were they freed. They could, however, work for the Union Army for wages and live in the abysmal conditions of the contraband camps. 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.

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

Black people made their opposition to colonization loud and clear in the summer of 1862. Lincoln, desiring their support, welcomed five Black men to the President’s House on August 14, 1862. The delegation was led by the Reverend Joseph Mitchell, the commissioner of emigration for the Interior Department. The discussion quickly turned into a lecture. The Black race could never “be placed on an equality with the white race” in the United States, Lincoln professed. Whether this “is right or wrong I need not discuss,” he said. Lincoln then blamed the presence of Blacks for the war. If Blacks leave, all will be well, Lincoln touted. “Sacrifice something of your present comfort,” Lincoln advised, asking the group to press their fellow Blacks to make the trek to Liberia and start anew. To refuse would be “extremely selfish.”

“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.”

Slavery meant “receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent,” said the group’s spokesman, Garrison Frazier (The Liberator editor’s name was everywhere). Freedom was “placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor.” To accomplish this—to be truly free—we must “have land.”

On January 31, 1865, House members passed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing 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.

On December 18, 1865, the United States officially added the Thirteenth Amendment to its Constitution.

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.

Only from the perspective of someone who refused to acknowledge discrimination in racial disparities, who wanted to maintain White privileges and the power to discriminate, could this bill be seen as “in favor of the colored and against the white race,” to use Johnson’s words. Johnson came from a Democratic Party busily shouting that to give Blacks voting rights would result in “nigger domination.” 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.

Klansmen religiously believed that Blacks possessed supernatural sexual powers, and this belief fueled their sexual attraction to Black women and their fear of White women being attracted to Black men. It became almost standard operating procedure to justify Klan terrorism by maintaining that southern White supremacy was necessary to defend the purity of White women. Black women’s bodies, in contrast, were regarded as a “training ground” for White men, or a stabilizing “safety valve” for White men’s “sexual energies” that allowed the veneration of the asexual pureness of White womanhood to continue.

Seeking to reunite White northerners and southerners through Christian Whiteness, Henry Ward Beecher published the first American biography of Jesus, The Life of Jesus, the Christ, in 1871. “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.

To this day, the Supreme Court still uses Miller’s doctrine to shield private and race-veiled discriminators, those who veil policies intended to discriminate against Black people by not using racial language.

Mississippi’s embattled Republican governor, Adelbert Ames, declared that “a revolution is taking place—by force of arms—and a race are disenfranchised—they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom—an era of second slavery.” A southern newspaper declared that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments “may stand forever; but we intend… to make them dead letters.”17

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.”

As White terrorists brutalized, raped, and killed people in communities around the Black world, the first crop of Western criminologists were intent on giving criminals a Black face and the well-behaved citizen a White face.

Outgoing president Grant privately told his cabinet that giving Black men the ballot had been a mistake, and so did Republican presidential hopeful Rutherford B. Hayes.

When troops departed Shreveport, Louisiana, a Black man grieved about his people being back in “the hands of the very men that held [them] as slaves,” so that “there was no way on earth they could better [their] condition.”22

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 and deed to regain absolute political, economic, and cultural control of the South.24

“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.

Over the next decade, the progression of racism came to all the former Confederate states and even several border states. They all followed Mississippi’s example, instituting race-veiled voting restrictions, from literacy tests to poll taxes, that would purge their voting rolls of the remaining Black (and many poor White) voters without saying a racial word. The South, once again, defied the US Constitution—this time, without firing a single shot, and without northern retaliation.

no one really knew the actual crime rates—all of the instances of Americans breaking the law, whether caught or not. But the higher Black arrest and prison rates substantiated the racist ideas of more Black crime. And these racist ideas spun the cycle of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system, more suspicions of Black people, more police in Black neighborhoods, more arrests and prison time for Black people, and thus more suspicions, and on and on.

Some Black newspaper editors saw through the mask, connecting the nation’s foreign racial policy to its domestic racial policy. They blasted the “robbers, murderers, and unscrupulous monopolists,” to quote the Salt Lake City Broad Ax in 1899. The federal government “could not deal justly with dark-skinned peoples,” another paper blared, “as evidenced by its do-nothing record at home.”

Blacks in the early twentieth century would joke that the first English word immigrants learned was “nigger.”12

JANUARY 29, 1901, the lone Black representative, George H. White of North Carolina, gave his farewell address to Congress. About 90 percent of the nation’s Black people resided in the South, but they were no longer represented by Black politicians in the state legislatures and in Congress. Their mass disenfranchisement, and charges of incompetency leveled against Black politicians by White ones, had made sure of that. “This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the negroes’ temporary farewell to the American Congress,” said White, “but let me say, Phoenix-like he will rise up someday and come again.” Not many believed him. As White trotted out of the hall, the leading American historians and political scientists looked upon him as the Reconstruction era’s final defective product in the nation’s capital.13

His most notable student was Georgia native Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. In American Negro Slavery (1918), along with eight more books and a duffel bag of articles, Phillips erased the truth of slavery as a highly lucrative enterprise dominated by planters who incessantly forced a resisting people to labor through terror, manipulation, and racist ideas. Instead he dreamed up an unprofitable commerce dominated by benevolent, paternalistic planters civilizing and caring for a “robust, amiable, obedient and content” barbaric people. Phillips’s pioneering use of plantation documents legitimated his racist dreams and made them seem like objective realities. Phillips remained the most respected scholarly voice on slavery until the mid-twentieth century.

Most textbook writers excluded Black people from schoolbooks as deliberately as southern Democrats excluded them from the polls.

In the fictional trilogy, which was taken as historical fact by millions, Dixon posed Reconstruction as a period when corrupt, incompetent northerners and Black legislators ruled, terrorized, disenfranchised, and raped southern Whites until they were redeemed by the might and virtue of the Ku Klux Klan. Nothing arrested the national mind in the hazards of Black voting, nothing justified the do-nothing attitude, better than this racist fiction of Reconstruction, whether it was written by novelists or by scholars.

South Carolina senator Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman was not restrained: “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger,” he said, “will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.” Tillman showed in this statement the real purpose of lynchings: if racist ideas won’t subdue Blacks, then violence will.

The strategy remained deeply racist. Black people, apparently, were responsible for changing racist White minds. White people, apparently, were not responsible for their own racist mentalities. If White people were racist and discriminated against Blacks, then Black people were to blame, because they had not commanded Whites’ respect?

Scholars questioned or rejected the widely held impression that races were biologically distinct, and that cardiologists could actually distinguish “Black blood,” and that below the skin and hair, doctors and scientists could actually distinguish a Black body, or a “Black disease.”

Boas delivered Atlanta University’s commencement address. “To those who stoutly maintain a material inferiority of the Negro race,” he proclaimed, “the past history of your race does not sustain [that] statement.” Boas then astonished Du Bois and probably many of his Black students by recounting the glories of precolonial West African kingdoms like those of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay. Boas awakened Du Bois from the paralysis of his historical racism, or, as Du Bois explained it, “from the paralysis of the commonly held judgement taught to me in high school and in two of the world’s great universities”: that Africans had “no history.”3

Jack Johnson’s earlier “heartaches” with two Black women had caused him to date primarily White women. Johnson loathed that “no matter how colored women feel toward a man, they don’t spoil him and pamper him and build up his ego.” White women did, and thus they were superior partners, in Johnson’s version of gender racism. In actuality, some White women refused to build up their man’s ego, while some Black women catered to their man’s ego. But by 1909, the gender racism of the submissive White woman and the hard Black woman was attracting patriarchal Black men to White women—just as the gender racism of the weak Black man being unable to handle the hard Black woman had attracted some Black women to the strong White man; and just as the gender racism of hypersexual Black people, embodied in the large penis or buttocks, attracted some White people to Black people; and just as the assimilationist belief that the Whiter and straighter the skin and hair, the more beautiful a person was, attracted Black people to (light and) White people. All these racist myths only hardened over the next century as Americans became better able to act on their interracial attractions in public.

The defining message of the Tarzan series was clear: whether on Wall Street or in the forests of Central Africa, swinging through Greek literature or swinging from trees, White people will do it better than the African apelike children, so much better that Whites will always, the world over, become teachers of African people. Forget Jack Johnson’s heavyweight title, White men had something better now.

The eugenics movement created believers, not evidence. Americans wanted to believe that the racial, ethnic, class, and gender hierarchies in the United States were natural and normal. They wanted to believe that they were passing their traits on to their children.12

“North American negroes… in culture and language,” Boas said, were “essentially European.” Boas was “absolutely opposed to all kinds of attempts to foster racial solidarity,” including among his own Jewish people. He, like other assimilationists, saw the United States as a melting pot in which all the cultural colors became absorbed together (into White Americanness). Ironically, assimilationists like Boas hated racial solidarity, but kept producing racist ideas based on racial solidarity.14

At their antiracist best, praises for Black firsts turned into demonstrations against racial discrimination, and demands for Black seconds and tenths and thirtieths. At their racist worst, Americans held up Black firsts as extraordinary Negroes, or as signposts of racial progress.

But accommodating Black firsts advocated for a greater Black work ethic as a better social policy than action against discriminatory bars. If some could break away, the logic went, then all could, if they worked hard enough. Racist logic didn’t have to be logical; it just had to make common sense. And so, as much as Black firsts broke racial barriers, the publicity around Black firsts sometimes, if not most times, reinforced racist ideas blaming Blacks and not the remaining discriminatory barriers.16

A few years later, Du Bois published a forum on women’s suffrage, particularly for the Black woman. Not many of the Black contributors advanced the popular (and sexist) argument of White suffragists: that women’s innate (childlike) morality gave them a distinct entitlement to the vote.

Wilson enjoyed the first-ever film screening at the White House, and the selection was a stark symbol of his ideas about race. The 1915 film was Hollywood’s first feature-length studio production, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, based on Thomas Dixon’s popular novel The Clansmen. The film signaled the birth of Hollywood and of the motion-picture industry in the United States. It became the newest visual medium by which to circulate racist ideas, eclipsing the fading minstrel shows.

Eugenicist ideas also became part of the fledgling discipline of psychology and the basis of newly minted standardized intelligence tests. Many believed these tests would prove once and for all the existence of natural racial hierarchies. In 1916, Stanford eugenicist Lewis Terman and his associates “perfected” the IQ test based on the dubious theory that a standardized test could actually quantify and objectively measure something as intricate and subjective and varied as intelligence across different experiential groups. The concept of general intelligence did not exist. When scholars tried to point out this mirage, it seemed to be as much in the eye of the beholder as general beauty, another nonexistent phenomenon. But Terman managed to make Americans believe that something that was inherently subjective was actually objective and measurable. Terman predicted that the IQ test would show “enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture.” Standardized tests became the newest “objective” method of proving Black intellectual inferiority and justifying discrimination, and a multimillion-dollar testing industry quickly developed in schools and workplaces.8

Garvey’s assimilationist opponents failed to realize that there was nothing inherently tolerant or intolerant about Americans voluntarily separating themselves or integrating themselves. Americans routinely did separate and integrate themselves, voluntarily, based on religion, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, profession, class, race, and social interests. 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.

President Calvin Coolidge, the Massachusetts Republican who replaced Harding after his sudden death in 1923, happily signed the legislation before his reelection. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote as vice-president-elect in 1921. “The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.”

Unlike eugenicists and assimilationists, Du Bois desired a multiracial pluralism, where differences were acknowledged, embraced, and equalized in antiracist fashion, not graded, suppressed, and ignored.