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

by Ibram X. Kendi

Old and new racist policies remained as overt as ever, and we can see the effects of these policies whenever we see racial disparities in everything from wealth to health in the twenty-first century.

Time and again, racist ideas have not been cooked up from the boiling pot of ignorance and hate. Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era,

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.

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.

Racist ideas are ideas. Anyone can produce them or consume them,

Anyone—Whites, Latina/os, Blacks, Asians, Native Americans—anyone can express the idea that Black people are inferior, that something is wrong with Black people. Anyone can believe both racist and antiracist ideas, that certain things are wrong with Black people and other things are equal.

the only thing wrong with Black people is that we think something is wr...

the only thing extraordinary about White people is that they think something is extraor...

there is nothing wrong with Black people as a group, or with any other racial group.

Stamped from the Beginning is about these closed-minded, cunning, captivating producers of racist ideas. But it is not for them.

The shift to solely enslaving Black people, and justifying it using the curse of Ham, was in the offing. Once that shift occurred, the disempowered curse theory became empowered, and racist ideas truly came into being.

Evoking repeatedly the term “christian white servant” and defining their rights, Virginia lawmakers fully married Whiteness and Christianity, uniting rich White enslavers and the non-slaveholding White poor. To seal the unity (and racial loyalty), Virginia’s White lawmakers seized and sold all property owned by “any slave,”

The story would be told many times in American history: Black property legally or illegally seized; the resulting Black destitution blamed on Black inferiority; the past discrimination ignored when the blame was assigned.

Demean Black people, and praise White people, without ever saying Black people or White people.1 Historians have named this the “southern strategy.” In fact, it was—and remained over the next five decades—the national Republican strategy

In a 1968 Gallup poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed Nixon’s campaign slogan: “Law and order has broken down in the country.”

“The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves