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

by Ibram X. Kendi

While misbehaving White children have received compassion and tolerance—as they should—misbehaving Black children have been more likely to hear “No Excuses” and to be on the receiving end of zero tolerance and handcuffs. More than 70 percent of students arrested at school during the 2009–2010 school year were Black or Latina/o, according to Department of Education statistics.

While national reporters quickly reached the city and captured for their cameras thousands of residents of the predominantly Black Ninth Ward trapped on roofs and in the Superdome, federal officials made excuses for their delays. It took three days to deploy rescue troops to the Gulf Coast region, more time than it took to get troops on the ground to quell the 1992 Rodney King rebellion, and the result was deadly. “I believe it was racism,” said a paramedic who witnessed the death spiral in New Orleans.

Libertarian journalist Matt Welch did not mince words or the truth when he declared that the “deadly bigotry” of the media probably helped “kill Katrina victims.”

White American Nazi-type terrorists had murdered forty-eight Americans—almost twice as many as were killed by anti-American Islamic terrorists. Law enforcement agencies were looking upon these White American terrorists as more dangerous to American lives than anti-American Islamic terrorists. But these White terrorists are not on the radar of the hawks who are endlessly waging their War on Terror.

Months into Obama’s presidency, the postracialists slammed down their new ground rules for race relations: Criticize millions of Black people whenever you want, as often as you want. That’s not racialism or racism or hate. You’re not even talking about race. But whenever you criticize a single White discriminator, that’s race-speak, that’s hate-speak, that’s being racist. If the purpose of racist ideas had always been to silence the antiracist resisters to racial discrimination, then the postracial line of attack may have been the most sophisticated silencer to date.

And when Black people leave those jails that are crowded with Black and Brown people, the slavery ends only so new forms of legal discrimination can begin. “A criminal record today authorizes precisely the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind—discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service,” Alexander wrote. “Those labeled criminals can be denied the right to vote.”

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

It has been true that racist policies have benefited White people in general at the expense of Black people (and others) in general. That is the story of racism, of unequal opportunity in a nutshell. But it is also true that a society of equal opportunity, without a top 1 percent hoarding the wealth and power, would actually benefit the vast majority of White people much more than racism does.

Antiracists should stop connecting selfishness to racism, and unselfishness to antiracism. Altruism is wanted, not required.

It is in the intelligent self-interest of White Americans to challenge racism, knowing they will not be free of sexism, class bias, homophobia, and ethnocentrism until Black people are free of racism.

Supporting these prevailing bigotries is only in the intelligent self-interest of a tiny group of super rich, Protestant, heterosexual, non-immigrant, White, Anglo-Saxon males. Those are the only people who need to be altruistic in order to be antiracist. The rest of us merely need to do the intelligent thing for ourselves.

Individual Blacks are not race representatives. They are not responsible for those Americans who hold racist ideas. Black people need to be their imperfect selves around White people, around each other, around all people. Black is beautiful and ugly, intelligent and unintelligent, law-abiding and law-breaking, industrious and lazy—and it is those imperfections that make Black people human, make Black people equal to all other imperfectly human groups.

“Negro leaders” thought that “white Americans did not know of or realize the continuing plight of the Negro,” he wrote in a 1935 essay. “Accordingly, for the last two decades, we have striven by book and periodical, by speech and appeal, by various dramatic methods of agitation, to put the essential facts before the American people. Today there can be no doubt that Americans know the facts; and yet they remain for the most part indifferent and unmoved.”

Power cannot be persuaded away from its self-interest. Power cannot be educated away from its self-interest. Those who have the power to abolish racial discrimination have not done so thus far, and they will never be persuaded or educated to do so as long as racism benefits them in some way.

An antiracist America can only be guaranteed if principled antiracists are in power, and then antiracist policies become the law of the land, and then antiracist ideas become the common sense of the people, and then the antiracist common sense of the people holds those antiracist leaders and policies accountable.