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

by Ibram X. Kendi

Soul on Ice

the Black family as an “absorbing, adaptive, and amazingly resilient mechanism for the socialization of its children.”

“What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

“Our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

In the week following King’s assassination, more than 125 cities experienced another wave of urban rebellions, which led to another backlash of law and order from racist Americans.

Too often, they regarded the world of poverty, hustling, prostitution, gambling, and criminality as the Black world, as if non-Blacks did not hustle, prostitute, deal drugs, gamble, and commit crimes at similar rates.

When the Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade three years later, President Nixon professed there were only two “times when an abortion is necessary”: “when you have a black and a white or a rape.”

There has always been a razor-thin line between the racist portrayer of Black negativity and the antiracist portrayer of imperfect Black humanity.

Carter administration, to boost the economy, started unprecedented cuts in social welfare, health care, and educational programs while increasing military spending.

the lowest Black poverty rate in US history in 1973,

“In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently. We cannot—we dare not—let the Fourteenth Amendment perpetuate racial supremacy.”

The Klan almost tripled its national membership between 1971 and 1980,

By the early 1980s, one study showed that for every White person killed by police officers, police killed twenty-two Black people.

But when the researchers compared only employed young males, the racial differences in violent behavior disappeared. Certain violent crime rates were higher in Black neighborhoods simply because unemployed people were concentrated in Black neighborhoods.

and stopped their antiracist activism.

Needs to back up this half of the sentence

In 2013, she concluded her study with a simple finding: poverty was worse for kids than crack.

the justices disconnected racial disparities from racism, deemed racial disparities a normal part of the criminal justice system,

“critical race theory.”

“intersectional theory,”

One of the greatest offshoots of the theory was critical Whiteness studies, investigating the anatomy of Whiteness, racist ideas, White privileges, and the transition of European immigrants into Whiteness.

while African Americans constituted 12 percent of the drug users, they constituted more than 36 percent of the drug arrests.

egging on the mass evangelical crusade for racial reconciliation in 1996 and 1997.

sixty-nine-year-old Coretta Scott King. “Martin Luther King, in fact, supported the concept of affirmative action,” she said. “Those who suggest he did not support affirmative action are misrepresenting his beliefs and his life’s work.”17

A truly multicultural nation ruled by multiculturalists would not have Christianity as its unofficial standard religion. It would not have suits as its standard professional attire. English would not be its standard language or be assessed by standardized tests. Ethnic Studies would not be looked upon as superfluous to educational curricula. Afrocentric scholars and other multicultural theorists, lecturing on multiple cultural perspectives, would not be looked upon as controversial. No cultural group would be directly and indirectly asked to learn and conform to any other group’s cultural norms in public in order to get ahead. A nation of different-looking people is not automatically multicultural or diverse if most of them practice or are learning to practice the same culture. The United States was maybe a multicultural nation in homes, behind closed doors, but certainly not in public in 1997.

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.

Like W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. before him, Obama lumped these “angry” antiracists with angry anti-White cynics to discredit them and distinguish himself from them. But when Du Bois and King ultimately arrived at antiracism, they had had to ward off the same “angry” and anti-White labels they had helped to produce.

nearly 1 million Black men in prison and the life expectancy of Black men being six years below White men did not make the discussion.

Few good Black men plus few good Black women equals few good Black people, equals racist ideas.

a myth continuously produced and reproduced by racists and antiracists alike: that racism materially benefits the majority of White people, that White people would lose and not gain in the reconstruction of an antiracist America.

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.

slavery kept the vast majority of southern Whites poor. It is not coincidental that more White Americans thrived during the antiracist movements from the 1930s to the early 1970s than ever before or since.

Altruism is wanted, not required. Antiracists do not have to be altruistic. Antiracists do not have to be selfless.

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 more Black people uplift themselves, the more they will find themselves on the receiving end of a racist backlash.

Individual Blacks are not race representatives.

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.

In fact, self-interest leads to racist policies, which lead to racist ideas leading to all the ignorance and hate.

that abolitionists and civil rights activists have steadily educated and persuaded away American racist ideas and policies sounds great. But it has never been the complete story, or even the main story. Politicians passed the civil and voting rights measures in the 1860s and the 1960s primarily out of political and economic self-interest—not an educational or moral awakening.

I'm not sure this is completely true. Some people who voted for passing these laws did so out of economic self interest but many were persuaded in the rightness of the law.

Powerful Americans also knew the facts during the lifetimes of Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, and W. E. B. Du Bois. It is the primary job of the powerful to know the facts of America. So trying to educate knowledgeable people does not make much sense. Trying to educate these powerful producers or defenders or ignorers of American racism about its harmful effects is like trying to educate a group of business executives about how harmful their products are. They already know, and they don’t care enough to end the harm.

Racist ideas have always been the public relations arm of the company of racial discriminators and their products: racial disparities. Eradicate the company, and the public relations arm goes down, too. Eradicate racial discrimination, then racist ideas will be eradicated, too.

The most effective protests have been fiercely local; they are protests that have been started by antiracists focusing on their immediate surroundings: their blocks, neighborhoods, schools, colleges, jobs, and professions. These local protests have then become statewide protests, and statewide protests have then become national protests, and national protests have then become international protests.

Any effective solution to eradicating American racism must involve Americans committed to antiracist policies seizing and maintaining power over institutions, neighborhoods, counties, states, nations—the world. It makes no sense to sit back and put the future in the hands of people committed to racist policies, or people who regularly sail with the wind of self-interest, toward racism today, toward antiracism tomorrow. 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.

Benjamin Banneker,

https://vimeo.com/3816635.