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

by Ibram X. Kendi

racist progress has consistently followed racial progress.

Young Black males were twenty-one times more likely to be killed by police than their White counterparts between 2010 and 2012, according to federal statistics.

Federal data show that the median wealth of White households is a staggering thirteen times the median wealth of Black households—and Black people are five times more likely to be incarcerated than Whites.

segregationists has blamed Black people themselves for the racial disparities.

antiracists has pointed to racial discrimination.

assimilationists has tried to argue for both, saying that Black people and racial discrimination were to...

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

racist. And yet so many prominent Americans, many of whom we celebrate for their progressive ideas and activism, many of whom had very good intentions, subscribed to assimilationist thinking that also served up racist beliefs about Black inferiority.

Frankly speaking, for generations of Americans, racist ideas have been their common sense.

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. I define anti-Black racist ideas—the subject of this book—as any idea suggesting that Black people, or any group of Black people, are inferior in any way to another racial group.

Black people are in reality a collection of groups differentiated by gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, culture, skin color, profession, and nationality—among a series of other identifiers, including biracial people who may or may not identify as Black.

“intersectionality”—prejudice stemming from the intersections of racist ideas and other forms of bigotry, such as sexism, classism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia.

During America’s first century, racist theological ideas were absolutely critical to sanctioning the growth of American slavery and making it acceptable to the Christian churches.

converts, Cotton Mather preached racial inequality in body while insisting that the dark souls of enslaved Africans would become White when they became Christians.

Racist intentions—not policies—became covert after the 1960s. Old and new racist policies remained as overt as ever,

Ignorance/hateracist ideasdiscrimination: this causal relationship is largely ahistorical. It has actually been the inverse relationship—racial discrimination led to racist ideas which led to ignorance and hate. Racial discriminationracist ideasignorance/hate: this is the causal relationship driving America’s history of race relations.

including theologians,

The principal function of racist ideas in American history has been the suppression of resistance to racial discrimination and its resulting racial disparities.

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.

We have a hard time recognizing that racial discrimination is the sole cause of racial disparities in this country and in the world at large.

That is what it truly means to think as an antiracist: to think there is nothing wrong with Black people, to think that racial groups are equal. There are lazy and unwise and harmful individuals of African ancestry. There are lazy and unwise and harmful individuals of European ancestry. There are industrious and wise and harmless individuals of European ancestry. There are industrious and wise and harmless individuals of African ancestry. But no racial group has ever had a monopoly on any type of human trait or gene—not now, not ever. 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. Black Americans’ history of oppression has made Black opportunities—not Black people—inferior.

When you truly believe that the racial groups are equal, then you also believe that racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimination.

St. Paul introduced, in the first century, a three-tiered hierarchy of slave relations—heavenly master (top), earthly master (middle), enslaved (bottom). “He who was free when called is a slave of Christ,” he testified in 1 Corinthians. “Slaves” were to “obey in everything those that are your earthly masters, not with eyeservice as men-pleasers, but in singleness of heart, fearing the Lord.” In a crucial caveat in Galatians 3:28, St. Paul equalized the souls of masters and slaves as “all one in Christ Jesus.”

Paul does not say anything about souls here. This is reading into Paul what he is not saying. That doesn't mean that the Puritans didn't use Paul this way though.

Lactantius, an adviser to Constantine I, the first Christian Roman emperor, announced early in the fourth century: “God who creates and inspires men wished them all to be fair, that is, equal.” St. Augustine, an African church father in the fourth and fifth centuries, maintained that “whoever is born anywhere as a human being, that is, as a rational mortal creature, however strange he may appear to our senses in bodily form or colour or motion or utterance, or in any faculty, part or quality of his nature whatsoever, let no true believer have any doubt that such an individual is descended from the one man who was first created.”

The first generation of Puritans began rationalizing the enslavement of these “Negroes” without skipping a Christian beat.

a theory somehow derived from Genesis 9:18–29, which said “that Negroes were the children of Ham, the son of Noah, and that they were singled out to be black as the result of Noah’s curse, which produced Ham’s colour and the slavery God inflicted upon his descendants,”

The lineage of this curse of Ham theory curves back through the great Persian scholar Tabari (838–923) all the way to Islamic and Hebrew sources. God had permanently cursed ugly Blackness and slavery into the very nature of African people, curse theorists maintained.

“lay in his own purpose; for he reflected with great pleasure upon the salvation of those souls that before were lost.”

Sickened by Taíno slavery, the Friars stunned Las Casas and broke abolitionist ground, rejecting the Spanish line (taken from the Portuguese) that the Taíno people benefited, through Christianity, from slavery. King Ferdinand promptly recalled the Dominican Friars, but their antislavery sermons never left Bartolomé de Las Casas. In 1515, he departed for Spain, where he would conduct a lifelong campaign to ease the suffering of Native Americans, and, possibly more importantly—solve the settlers’ extreme labor shortage. In one of his first written pleas in 1516, Las Casas suggested importing enslaved Africans to replace the rapidly declining Native American laborers,

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.

Racist ideas even when they are used to try to solve a humanitarian issue harm people.

At some point after that, Las Casas read Gomes Eanes de Zurara’s book. The more he read, the less he could square the African slave trade with the teachings of Jesus Christ. In History of the Indies (1561), released five years before his death, Las Casas regretted “the advice he gave the king” to import enslaved Africans. He saw in Zurara’s writing evidence revealing the slave trade to “be the horror that it is.” Las Casas lamented Zurara’s attempt “to blur [the slave trade] with the mercy and goodness of God.” Las Casas tried to close the door on African slavery, after opening it for so many Spanish slaveholders. He failed.

climate theory fell apart when he saw on an Arctic voyage in 1577 that the Inuit people in northeastern Canada were darker than the people living in the hotter south.

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.

exploitative master/servant or master/slave relationship as a loving family relationship.

And it was Perkins’s claim of equal souls and unequal bodies that led Puritan preachers like Cotton and Mather to minister to African souls and not challenge the enslavement of their bodies.

Commentary on Ephesians. In the commentary, Baynes said slavery was partly a curse for sins and partly a result of “civil condition,” or barbarism. “Blackmores” were “slavish,” he said, and he urged slaves to be cheerfully obedient. Masters were to show their superiority through kindness and through a display of “a white sincere heart.”

The word race first appeared in Frenchman Jacques de Brézé’s 1481 poem “The Hunt,” where it referred to hunting dogs. As the term expanded to include humans over the next century, it was used primarily to identify and differentiate and animalize African people.

The English translator of Leo the African’s book, who had defended curse theory, thus became colonial America’s first legislative leader.

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.

English common laws regarding not enslaving Christians—and

In the first official recognition of slavery in Virginia, legislators stipulated, in 1660 (and in stricter terms in 1661), that any White servant running away “in company with any negroes” shall serve for the time of the “said negroes absence”—even if it meant life.

With this law in place, White enslavers could now reap financial reward from relations “upon a negro woman.” But they wanted to prevent the limited number of White women from engaging in similar interracial relations (as their biracial babies would become free). In 1664, Maryland legislators declared it a “disgrace to our Nation” when “English women… intermarry with Negro slaves.” By the end of the century, Maryland and Virginia legislators had enacted severe penalties for White women in relationships with non-White men.

The Isle of Pines was one of the first portrayals in British letters of aggressive hypersexual African femininity. Such portrayals served both to exonerate White men of their inhuman rapes and to mask their human attractions to the supposed beast-like women.

Meanwhile, American enslavers publicly prostituted African women well into the eighteenth century (privately thereafter).

Like raped prostitutes, Black women’s credibility had been stolen by racist beliefs in their hypersexuality. For Black men, the story was similar. There was not a single article in the colonial era announcing the acquittal of a suspected Black male rapist. One-third of White men mentioned in rape articles were acknowledged as being acquitted of at least one charge. Moreover, “newspaper reports of rape constructed white defendants as individual offenders and black defendants as representative of the failings of their racial group,”

individualizing White negativity and generalizing Black negativity.

all of this lasciviousness on the part of Black men and women stemmed from their relatively large genitalia, the theory went.

slaves could and should become Christians. Planters had feared the conversion of slaves because they believed that if their slaves were Christian, they would have to be freed—and

Ligon’s distinction between making “a Christian a slave” and “a slave a Christian” turned this idea on its head.