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

by Ibram X. Kendi

In 1614, England’s first famous working-class poet, John Taylor, said that “black nations” adored the “Black” Devil. In a 1615 address for the planters in Ireland and Virginia, the Reverend Thomas Cooper said that White Shem, one of Noah’s three sons, “shall be Lord over” the “cursed race of Cham”—meaning Noah’s son Ham—in Africa. Future Virginia politician George Sandys also conjured curse theory to degrade Blackness. In a 1620 paraphrase of Genesis, future politician Thomas Peyton wrote of Cain, or “the Southern man,” as a “black deformed elf,” and “the Northern white, like unto God himself.”