Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

by Jason Reynolds

To know the past is to know the present. To know the present is to know yourself.

I thought there were certain things wrong with Black people (and other racial groups). Fooled by racist ideas, I did not fully realize that the only thing wrong with Black people is that we think something is wrong with Black people.

I did not fully realize that the only thing extraordinary about White people is that they

think something is extraordinary about White people. There are lazy, hardworking, wise, unwise, harmless, and harmful individuals of every race, but no racial group is bette...

There will come a time when Americans will realize that the only thing wrong with Black people is that they think something is wrong with Black people. There will come a time when racist ideas will no longer obstruct us from seeing the complete and utter abnormality of racial disparities. There will come a time when we will love humanity, when we will gain the courage to fight for an equitable society for our beloved humanity, knowing, intelligently, that when we fight for humanity, we are fighting for ourselves. There will come a time. Maybe, just maybe, that time is now.

Three words to describe the people we’ll be exploring: Segregationists. Assimilationists. Antiracists.

Segregationists are haters. Like, real haters. People who hate you for not being like them.

Assimilationists are people who like you, but only with quotation marks.

Like…“like” you. Meaning, they “like” you because ...

And then there are antiracists. They love you because...

Gomes Eanes de Zurara. Zurara, which sounds like a cheerleader chant, did just that. Cheerleaded? Cheerled? Whatever. He was a cheerleader. Kind of. Not the kind who roots for a team and pumps up a crowd, but he was a man who made sure the team he played for was

represented and heralded as great. He made sure Prince Henry was looked at as a brilliant quarterback making ingenious plays, and that every touchdown was the mark of a superior player. How did Zurara do this? Through literature. Storytelling.

trading. The Portuguese now saw enslaving people as missionary work. A mission from God to help civilize and Christianize the African “savages.” At least, that’s what Zurara claimed. And the reason this was a one-up on his competitors, the Spanish and Italians, was because they were still enslaving eastern Europeans, as in White people (not called White people back then). Zurara’s ace, his trick shot, was that the Portuguese had enslaved Africans (of all shades, by the way) supposedly for the purpose of saving their wretched souls.

what makes him the world’s first racist? Well, Zurara was the first person to write about and defend Black human ownership, and this single document began the recorded history of anti-Black racist ideas. You know how the kings are always attached to where they rule? Like, King John of Portugal? Well, if Gomes Eanes de Zurara was the king of anything (which he wasn’t), he would’ve been King Gomes of Racism.

Zurara’s book became an anthem. A song sung all across Europe as

the primary source of knowledge on unknown Africa and African peoples for the original slave traders and enslavers in Spain, Holland, France, and England.

Zurara depicted Africans as savage animals that needed taming. This depiction over time would even begin to convince some Afr...

And in that survey, Africanus echoed Zurara’s sentiments of Africans, his own people. He said they were hypersexual savages, making him the first known African racist.

Africans needed slavery in order to be fed and taught Jesus, and that it was all ordained by God, began to seep in and stick to the European cultural psyche. And a few hundred years later, this idea would eventually reach America.

Because if there’s one thing we all know about humans, it’s that most of us are followers, looking for something to be part of to make us feel better

about our own selfishness. Or is that just me? Just me? Got it. Anyway, the followers came sniffing around, drumming up their own cockamamie (best word ever, even better than Zurara, though possibly a synonym) theories, two of which would set the table for the conversation around racism for centuries to come. Those theories were:

1. CLIMATE ...

Aristotle (we’ll get back to him later), who questioned whether Africans were born “this way” or if the heat of t...

Many agreed it was climate, and that if African people lived in cooler temperatures, they could,...

2. CURSE ...

In 1577, after noticing that Inuit people in northeaste...

cold) Canada were darker than the people living in the hotter south, English travel writer George Best determined—conveniently for all parties interested in owning slaves—that it couldn’t have been climate that made darker people inferi...

Curse theory would become the anchor of what would justify American slavery.

man named William Perkins, called Ordering a Familie, published in 1590, in which he argued that the slave was just part of a loving family unit that was

ordered a particular way. And that the souls and the potential of the souls were equal, but not the skin. It’s like saying, “I look at my dog like I look at my children, even though I’ve trained my dog to fetch my paper by beating it and yanking its leash.” But the idea of it all let the new enslavers off the emotional hook and portrayed them as benevolent do-gooders “cleaning up” the Africans.

generation later, slavery touched down in the newly c...

each of whom saw himself as a similar kind of do-gooder. Their names, John Cotton and Richard Mather. About Cotton and Mather. They were Puritans. About Puritans. They were English Protestants who believed the reformation of the Church of England was basically watering down Christianity, and they sought to regulate it to keep it more disciplined and rigid. So, these two men, at different times, traveled across the Atlantic in search of a new land (which would be Boston) where they

could escape English persecution and preach their version—a “purer” version—of Christianity. They landed in America after treacherous trips, especially Richard Mather, whose ship sailed into a storm in 1635 and almost collided with a massive rock in the ocean. Mather, of course, saw his survival of this journey to America as a miracle, and became even more devoted to God. Both men were ministers. They built churches in Massachusetts but, more important, they built systems. The church wasn’t just a place of worship. The church was a place

of power and influence, and in this new land, John Cotton and Richard Mather had a whole lot of power and influence. And the first thing they did to spread the Puritan way was find other people who were like-minded. And with those like-minded folks, they created schools to enforce higher education skewed toward their way of thinking. What school, do you think, was the first to get the Puritan touch? This is a trick question. Because the answer is th...

America ever was Harvard ...

Cotton and Mather were students of Aristotle. And Aristotle, though held up as one of the greatest Greek philosophers of all time, famous for things we will not be discussing here because this is not a history book, believed something else he’s not nearly as famous for. And that’s his belief in human hierarchy.

And just like that, the groundwork was laid not only for slavery to be justified but for it to be justified for a long, long time, simply because it was woven into the religious and educational systems of America. All that was needed to complete this oppressive puzzle was slaves.

you were either dirt folk or church folk, everyone working to grow on stolen land—obviously their native neighbors weren’t happy about any of this, because their world was being broken, while a new world was being built, planted one seed at a time.

That seed? Tobacco. A man named John Pory (a defender of curse theory), the cousin of one of the early major landowners, was named America’s first legislative leader.

But if tobacco was really going to bring in some money, if it was really going to be the natural resource used to power the country, then they would need more human resource to grow it. See where this is going?

The Bautista was carrying 350 Angolans, because Latin American slaveholders had already figured out their own slave-trading system and had enslaved 250,000 people.

The pirates robbed the Bautista, taking sixty of the Angolans. They headed east, eventually coming upon the shores of Jamestown, Virginia. They sold twenty Angolans to that cousin of John Pory. The one with all the land, who happened also to be the governor of Virginia. His name was George Yeardley, and those first twenty slaves, for Yeardley and Pory, were right on time… to work.

Planters wanted to grow profits, while missionaries wanted to grow God’s kingdom.

Saving their crops each year was more important to them than saving souls. It was harvest over humanity. And the excuses they gave to avoid baptizing slaves were: Africans were too barbaric to be converted. Africans were savage at the soul. Africans couldn’t be loved EVEN BY GOD.

There was a piece in 1664 by the British minister Richard Baxter called A Christian Directory

NOTES ON BAXTER: He believed slavery was helpful for African people. He even said there were “voluntary slaves,” as in Africans who wanted to be slaves so that they could be baptized. (Voluntary slaves? Richard Baxter was clearly out of his mind.)

There was also work by the great English philoso...

NOTES ON LOCKE (in regard to African people): He believed that the most unblemished, purest, perfect minds belonged to Whites, which basi...

And by the Italian philosopher Lucilio Vanini. NOTES ON VANINI: He believed ...

“different Adam,” and had a different creation story. Of course, this would mean they were a different species. It was kind of like saying (or to him, proving) that Africans weren’t actually human. Like they were maybe animals, or monsters, or aliens, but not human—at least not like Whites—and therefore didn’t have to be treated as such. This theory, which is called po...