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

by Ibram X. Kendi

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.

species. 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.

In 1745, someone brought a two-year-old Thomas Jefferson out of Shadwell’s big house. Thomas was held up to a woman on horseback who placed him on a pillow secured to the horse. The rider, who was a slave, took the boy for a ride to a relative’s plantation. This was Thomas Jefferson’s earliest childhood memory. It associated slavery with comfort. The slave was entrusted with looking after him, and on his soft saddle he felt safe and secure, later recalling the woman as “kind and gentle.”

Peter preached to his children the importance of self-reliance—oblivious of the contradiction—to which he credited his own success.

Peter did not, however, preach to his son the importance of religion. In fact, when Virginia’s First Great Awakening reached the area, it bypassed the Shadwell plantation. Peter did not allow Samuel Davies, who almost single-handedly brought the Awakening to Virginia, to minister to his children or his captives.

Enslavers commonly “let [slaves] live on in their Pagan darkness,” fearing Christianity would incite their resistance,

Not all Christian missionaries were protecting slavery by preaching Christian submission in the mid-eighteenth century. In 1742, New Jersey native John Woolman, a store clerk, was asked to write a bill of sale for an unnamed African woman. He began to question the institution and soon kicked off what became a legendary traveling ministry, spreading Quakerism and antislavery.

In arguing against slavery over the years, he found himself arguing against African inferiority, and thus arguing against himself. He had to rethink whether White people were in fact bestowed a “high Station.”

We must speak out against slavery “from a love of equity,” Woolman avowed in the second part of the pamphlet. He dropped the rhetoric of greater “Favours” in a racial sense, although it remained in a religious sense. His antiracism shined.

Hume strongly opposed slavery, but like many other abolitionists of the Enlightenment period, he never saw his segregationist thinking as contradicting his antislavery stance.

Selina Hastings,

Methodist trailblazer, who promoted the writings of Christian Blacks as a testament of Black capability for conversion. Two years before her death, the countess sponsored Olaudah Equiano’s aptly titled Interesting Narrative of his Nigerian birth, capture, enslavement, education, and emancipation in 1789.

Whether benevolent or not, any idea that suggests that Black people as a group are inferior, that something is wrong with Black people, is a racist idea. Slavery was killing, torturing, raping, and exploiting people, tearing apart families, snatching precious time, and locking captives in socioeconomic desolation. The confines of enslavement were producing Black people who were intellectually, psychologically, culturally, and behaviorally different, not inferior.

1774 organized the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the first known antislavery society of non-Africans in North America.

In thanks, Wheatley dedicated her book, the first ever by an African American woman and the second by an American woman, to the countess. The publication of her poems in September 1773, a year after slavery had been outlawed in England and a few months after Rush’s abolitionist pamphlet reached England, set off a social earthquake in London.

segregationists. So long as there was slavery, there would be racist ideas justifying it.

“We perceive by our own Reflection, that we are endowed with the same Faculties with our masters, and there is nothing that leads us to a Belief, or Suspicion, that we are any more obliged to serve them, than they us.”

German philosopher Immanuel Kant,

But his “all Men are created equal” was revolutionary nonetheless; it even propelled Vermont and Massachusetts to abolish slavery.

For Jefferson, power came before freedom.

An estimated two-thirds of enslaved Africans in Georgia ran away. According to Jefferson’s own calculations, Virginia lost as many as 30,000 enslaved Africans in a single year.

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.

Rhode Island pastor Samuel Hopkins, an antislavery Puritan,

Americans’ so-called enslavement to the British was “lighter than a feather” compared to Africans’ enslavement to Americans, Hopkins argued.

Hopkins became the first major Christian leader outside of the Society of Friends to forcefully oppose slavery, but he sat lonely on the pew of antislavery in 1776.

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.

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 ambitious politician, maybe fearful of alienating potential friends, maybe torn between Enlightenment antislavery and American proslavery, maybe honestly unsure, did not pick sides between polygenesists and monogenesists, between segregationists and assimilationists, between slavery and freedom. But he did pick the side of racism.

Volney mused, “To the race of negroes, at present our slaves, and the objects of our extreme contempt, we owe our arts, sciences, and even the use of speech itself.”

The only delegate who pounced on the three-fifths “compromise” was Massachusetts abolitionist and future vice president Elbridge Gerry. “Blacks are property, and are used [in the South]… as horses and cattle are [in the North],” Gerry stammered out. So “why should their representation be increased to the southward on account of the number of slaves, [rather] than [on the basis of] horses or oxen to the north?”

By September 17, 1787, delegates in Philadelphia had extracted “slave” and “slavery” from the signed US Constitution to hide their racist enslavement policies.

After a bitter debate, the delegates in Philadelphia put in place provisions for eliminating the slave trade in twenty years, a small triumph, since only Georgia and North Carolina allowed slave imports in the summer of 1787.

Hemings was more or less forced to settle for the overtures of a sexually aggressive forty-four-year-old

Jefferson had always assailed interracial relationships between White women and Black or biracial men. Before arriving in Paris, he had lobbied, unsuccessfully, for Virginia’s White women to be banished (instead of merely fined) for bearing the child of a Black or biracial man. Even after his measure was defeated, even after his relations with Hemings began, and even after the relations matured and he had time to reflect on his own hypocrisy, Jefferson did not stop proclaiming his public position. “Amalgamation with the other color, produces degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent,” he wrote in 1814, after he had fathered several biracial children. Like so many men who spoke out against “amalgamation” in public, and who degraded Black or biracial women’s beauty in public, Jefferson hid his actual views in the privacy of his mind and bedroom.

Jefferson had to deal with a revolt from sixteen-year-old Sally Hemings. She was pregnant with his child, refused to return to slavery, and planned to petition French officials for her freedom. Jefferson did the only thing he could do: “He promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed,”

Hemings gave birth to at least five and possibly as many as seven children from Jefferson, a paternity confirmed by DNA tests and documents proving they were together nine months prior to the birth of each of Sally’s children. Some of the children died young, but Jefferson kept his word and freed their remaining children when they reached adulthood.

Northern states, in gradually eliminating slave labor during the Revolutionary era, made almost no moves—gradual or otherwise—to end racial discrimination and thereby racist ideas. Proposals to ensure the manageability of African people by former masters, as if they were more naturally slave than free, shadowed abolition proposals. Discriminatory policies were a feature of almost every emancipation law.

the first Naturalization Act on March 26, 1790, which limited citizenship to “free white persons” of “good character.”

“they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much.”

This strategy of what can be termed uplift suasion was based on the idea that White people could be persuaded away from their racist ideas if they saw Black people improving their behavior, uplifting themselves from their low station in American society. 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.

“negative” Black behavior, said that idea, was partially or totally responsible for the existence and persistence of racist ideas.

Upwardly mobile Blacks were regularly cast aside as unique and as different from ordinary, inferior Black people.

“If you were well dressed they would insult you for that, and if you were ragged you would surely be insulted for being so,”

John Adams privately called it a “blot on his character” and the “natural and almost unavoidable consequence of that foul contagion in the human character, Negro slavery.”

From teens ending their (and their victims’) virginity, to married men sneaking around, to single and widowed men having their longtime liaisons—master/slave rape or intercourse seemed “natural,” and enslaving one’s children seemed normal in slaveholding America.

Slave Trade Act of 1807. But Congress did nothing to ensure the act’s enforcement. It was an empty and mostly symbolic law. The act failed to close the door on the ongoing international slave trade while flinging open the door to a domestic one.

“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.”

Ending the international slave trade was in reality a boon for the largest American slave-owners, as it increased the demand and value of their captives. And so the largest slave-owners and the gradual-emancipation advocates joined hands in cheering on the l...

Parisians displayed Baartman’s skeleton, genitals, and brain until 1974. When President Nelson Mandela took office in 1994, he renewed South Africans’ calls for Baartman’s return home. France returned her remains to her homeland in 2002. After a life and afterlife of unceasing exhibitions, Baartman finally rested in peace.