Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
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A group we can call segregationists has blamed Black people themselves for the racial disparities. A group we can call antiracists has pointed to racial discrimination. A group we can call assimilationists has tried to argue for both, saying that Black people and racial discrimination were to blame for racial disparities.
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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.
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Cotton Mather (1663–1728), our first tour guide.
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our second tour guide, the antislavery, anti-abolitionist Thomas Jefferson
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editor of The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), tour guide number three.
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Black scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), our fourth tour guide,
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Angela Davis (1943–present) spent the next
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She will be our fifth and final tour guide.
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The principal function of racist ideas in American history has been the suppression of resistance to racial discrimination and its resulting racial disparities.
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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.
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that indispensable intellectual activity of someone consumed with racist ideas: individualizing White negativity and generalizing Black negativity. Negative behavior by any Black person became proof of what was wrong with Black people, while negative behavior by any White person only proved what was wrong with that person.
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the Golden Rule would forever inspire the cause of White antiracists.
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They wanted evangelists preaching a racist Christianity for submission, not an antiracist Christianity for liberation.
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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.
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For Jefferson, power came before freedom. Indeed, power creates freedom, not the other way around—as the powerless are taught.
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Thomas Jefferson only really handed revolutionary license to his band of wealthy, White, male revolutionaries.
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“Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” This hodgepodge of thoughts was classic Jefferson, classically both antislavery and anti-abolition—with a segregationist dose of nature’s distinctions, and an antiracist dose acknowledging White prejudice and discrimination.9
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Positive Black behavior, abolitionist strategists held, undermined racist ideas, and negative Black behavior confirmed them.
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It was the cruel illogic of racism. When Black people rose, racists either violently knocked them down or ignored them as extraordinary. When Black people were down, racists called it their natural or nurtured place, and denied any role in knocking them down in the first place.
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Racist ideas always seemed to arrive right on time to dress up the ugly economic and political exploitation of African people.
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As pictures of this White Jesus started to appear, Blacks and Whites started to make connections, consciously and unconsciously, between the White God the Father, his White son Jesus, and the power and perfection of White people.
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Walker identified and decried America’s favorite racist pastime: denying Blacks access to education and jobs and then calling their resultant impoverished state “natural.”
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When Blacks were seen as simply people—a collection of imperfect individuals, equal to the imperfect collection of individuals with white skins—then Blacks’ imperfect behavior became irrelevant. Discrimination was the social problem: the cause of the racial disparities between two equal collections of individuals.12
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Racist ideas, clearly, did not generate these slave codes. Enslaving interests generated these slave codes. Racist ideas were produced to preserve the enslaving interests.20
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“When men oppress their fellow-men, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression.” Douglass, amazingly, summed up the history of racist ideas in a single sentence.
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Black people all over the South were saying this to Union officials: Do not abolish slavery and leave us landless. Do not force us to work for our former masters and call that freedom. They distinguished between abolishing slavery and freeing people. You can only set us free by providing us with land to “till… by our own labor,” they declared.
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In offering postwar policy, Black people were rewriting what it meant to be free. And, in antiracist fashion, they were rejecting integration as a race relations strategy that involved Blacks showing Whites their equal humanity. They were rejecting uplift suasion—rejecting the job of working to undo the racist ideas of Whites by not performing stereotypes. Racist ideas, they were saying, were only in the eyes of the beholder, and only the beholders of racist ideas were responsible for their release.
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Whenever talks earlier in the war touched on distributing land to Black people, Americans showed a respect for the landed rights of warring Confederates that they rarely showed for the landed rights of peaceful Native Americans.
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slavery was evil, and those racists justifying or ignoring slavery were evil, and it was the moral duty of the United States to eliminate the evil of slavery. Garrison did not use his genius again for antiracism, in declaring that racial disparities were evil, and that those racists justifying or ignoring disparities were evil, and that it was the moral duty of the United States to eliminate the evil of racial disparities.
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Only through the “White trash” construction could ideas of superior Whiteness be maintained, as it made invisible the majority of White people, the millions in poverty, by saying they were not ordinary Whites: they were “White trash.” Similarly, the upwardly mobile Blacks were not really Black: they were extraordinary.
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In his last major public speech, Garrison recognized racist ideas as the core of the problem. “We must give up the spirit of complexional caste,” Garrison declared, “or give up Christianity.”18
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South Carolina governor, Wade Hampton. “As the negro becomes more intelligent,” Hampton added, “he naturally allies himself with the more conservative whites, for his observation and experience both show him that his interests are identified with those of the white race here.”
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Hate fueled the lynching era. But behind this hatred lay racist ideas that had evolved to question Black freedoms at every stage. And behind these racist ideas were powerful White men, striving by word and deed to regain absolute political, economic, and cultural control of the South.24
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It was customary for assimilationists to charge antiracists as being like segregationists—all hate-filled and irrational. These fabricated labels would marginalize antiracists throughout the twentieth century,
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Since racist ideas deemed every individual Black person an expert and representative of the race, Black people like Thomas had always proved to be the perfect dispensers of racist ideas. Their Blackness made them more believable. Their Blackness did not invite defensive mechanisms to guard against their racist ideas about Black inferiority.
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The strategy remained deeply racist. Black people, apparently, were responsible for changing racist White minds. White people, apparently, were not responsible for their own racist mentalities. If White people were racist and discriminated against Blacks, then Black people were to blame, because they had not commanded Whites’ respect?
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The eugenics movement created believers, not evidence. Americans wanted to believe that the racial, ethnic, class, and gender hierarchies in the United States were natural and normal. They wanted to believe that they were passing their traits on to their children.12
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But accommodating Black firsts advocated for a greater Black work ethic as a better social policy than action against discriminatory bars. If some could break away, the logic went, then all could, if they worked hard enough. Racist logic didn’t have to be logical; it just had to make common sense. And so, as much as Black firsts broke racial barriers, the publicity around Black firsts sometimes, if not most times, reinforced racist ideas blaming Blacks and not the remaining discriminatory barriers.
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The pamphlet asked, given how bad things were, is it not amazing how far we’ve come? With every civil rights victory and failure, this line of reasoning became the standard past-future declaration of assimilationists: we have come a long way, and we have a ways to go. They purposefully sidestepped the present reality of racism.23
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they cared more about defending their separate-but-equal brand before America than defending the American-freedom brand before the world.
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the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom” was not the segregationist, “but the white moderate… who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.” King explained that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
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it also opened the floodgates for new racist ideas to pour in, including the most racist idea to date: it was an idea that ignored the White head start, presumed that discrimination had been eliminated, presumed that equal opportunity had taken over, and figured that since Blacks were still losing the race, the racial disparities and their continued losses must be their fault. Black people must be inferior, and equalizing policies—like eliminating or reducing White seniority, or instituting affirmative action policies—would be unjust and ineffective.
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Malcolm X’s unstinting humanism: “I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”20
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“When a people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance only when they have accumulated the power to enforce change,” King wrote. “Power is not the white man’s birthright; it will not be legislated for us and delivered in neat government packages.” The road to lasting progress was civil disobedience, not persuasion, King maintained. He bravely critiqued the all-powerful Moynihan Report, warning about the danger that “problems will be attributed to innate Negro weaknesses and used to justify neglect and rationalize oppression.”
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Carmichael and scholar Charles Hamilton gave innovative new names to two kinds of racism. They named and contrasted “individual racism,” which assimilationists regarded as the principal problem, and which assimilationists believed could be remedied by persuasion and education; and “institutional racism,” the institutional policies and collections of individual prejudices that antiracists regarded as the principal problem, and that antiracists believed only power could remedy.17
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Billingsley made the same case about African American culture. “To say that a people have no culture is to say that they have no common history which has shaped and taught them,” Billingsley argued. “And to deny the history of a people is to deny their humanity.”21
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There has always been a razor-thin line between the racist portrayer of Black negativity and the antiracist portrayer of imperfect Black humanity. When consumers have looked upon stereotypical Black portrayals as representative of Black behavior, instead of representative of those individual characters, then the generalizing consumers have been the racist problem, not the racist or antiracist portrayer.
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And so, on October 12, 1977, a White male sat before the Supreme Court requesting slight changes in UC Davis’s admissions policies to open sixteen seats for him—and not a poor Black woman requesting standardized tests to be dropped as an admissions criterion to open eighty-four seats for her. It was yet another case of racists v. racists that antiracists had no chance of winning.
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Powell framed affirmative action as “race-conscious” policies, while standardized test scores were not, despite common knowledge about the racial disparities in those scores.4
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Intellectuals and politicians were producing theories—like welfare recipients are lazy, or inner cities are dangerous, or poor people are ignorant, or one-parent households are immoral—that allowed Americans to call Black people lazy, dangerous, and immoral without ever saying “Black people,” which allowed them to deflect charges of racism.16
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