Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

by Jason Reynolds

and put it in bold. Like, Africans went from savages to SAVAGES, which revved up the necessity for Christ...

it’s important (very important) to note that there were also people all along the way who stood up and fought against these ridiculously racist ideas with abolitionist ideas.

a group of Mennonites in Germantown, Pennsylvania, rose up. The Mennonites were a Christian denomination from the German- and Dutch-speaking areas of central Europe. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, orthodox authorities were killing them for their religious beliefs. Mennonites didn’t want to leave behind one place of oppression to build another in America, so they circulated an antislavery petition on April 18, 1688, denouncing oppression due to skin color by equating it with oppression due

to religion. Both oppressions were wrong. This petition—the 1688 Germantown Petition Against Slavery—was the first piece of writing that was antiracist (word check!)...

You know the old saying, When the going gets tough, the ...

Because they needed their slaves. Because their slaves made them money. It’s really all quite simple.

the Native Americans. All this is happening on their land. A land that was taken from them forcefully, claimed and owned by Europeans running from their homelands,

afraid for their lives. It’s kind of like the kid who gets beat up every day at school, comes home crying to his mother, and she decides to take him to a new school. And guess what he does when he gets to the new school? He pretends like he wasn’t just on the receiving end of a boot sole and instead becomes the most annoying tough guy in the world. And the Native Americans were sick of the tough-acting, arrogant new kid. So… FIGHT!

people were dying. Bloodshed in the soil. The Puritans in New England had already lost homes and dozens of soldiers. But eventually a man named Metacomet, a Native American war leader, was killed, which basically ended the battle in 1676. Puritans cut up his body (like… savages?) as if it were a hog’s, and paraded his remains around Plymouth.

Down in Virginia, a twenty-nine-year-old frontier planter, Nathaniel Bacon…

what he did to disrupt the powers that be was shift his anger from the rich Whites to the Susquehannocks, a tribe of Natives.

As we say now, “Hit ’em in their pockets, where it really hurts.”

But the governor knew if Blacks and Whites joined forces, he’d be done. Everything would be done. It would’ve been an apocalypse. So, he had to devise a way to turn poor Whites and poor Blacks against each other, so that they’d be forever separated and unwilling to join hands and raise fists against the elite. And the way he did this was by creating (wait for it… ) White privileges.

So, White privileges were created, and, at this time, they included: 1. Only the White rebels were pardoned; legislators prescribed thirty lashes for any slave who lifted a hand “against any Christian” (Christian now meant White). 2.

All Whites now wielded absolute power to abuse any African person.

Those are the two most important ones—poor Whites wouldn’t be punished, but they coul...

REMEMBER JOHN COTTON AND RICHARD M

Richard Mather’s wife dies. John Cotton dies. Richard Mather marries John Cotton’s widow, Sarah. Richard Mather’s youngest son, Increase, marries Sarah’s daughter, Maria, making her his wife and stepsister. (Umm… )

Increase and Maria have a son. February 12, 1663. They name him after both families.

Cotton and Mather becomes… Co...

By the time Cotton Mather heard about Bacon’s Rebellion, he was already in college. An eleven-year-old Harvard student (the youngest of all time), he was obviously a nerd, and...

The thing about revolution is that it almost always has to do with poor people angry about being manipulated by the rich. So, Cotton Mather, though a recent graduate of Harvard and a God-fearing, sermonizing, well-read man, had a problem on his hands because… he was rich. He’d come from an elite family, gotten an elite education, and lived an elite, though pious, life, far from the planters and even farther from the slaves. So, the Revolution of 1688, which was called the Glorious Revolution, was not so glorious for him. And, fearing that the anger that caused

the uprising would go from the British elites to the elites right at home—meaning him—he created a new villain as a distraction. An invisible demon (cue the scary music). Mather wrote a book called Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions

Cotton Mather, the genius boy, destined for intellectual and spiritual greatness, w...

Once the witch hunt eventually died down, the Massachusetts authorities apologized to the accused, reversed the convictions of the trials, and provided reparations in the early 1700s. But Cotton Mather never stopped defending the Salem witch trials, because he never stopped defending the religious, slaveholding, gender, class, and racial hierarchies reinforced by the trials. He saw himself as the

defender of God’s law and the crucifier of any non-Puritan, African, Native American, poor person, or woman who defied God’s law by not submitting to it.

Boston was becoming the intellectual capital of the new America, and tobacco was taking off. Booming. Which meant more slaves were needed in order to manage

it. As the population of enslaved people grew, which is what slaveholders needed in order to till the land and grow the tobacco for free, the fear of more revolt grew with

So, in order to keep their human property from rising up, slaveholders and politicians created a new unnatural sy...

1. No interracial rela...

2. Tax imported captives.

3. Classify Natives and Blacks the same way you would horses and hogs in the tax code. Meaning, they were literally classified as livestock, and not as human. 4. Blacks can’t hold office. 5. All property owned by a slave is sold, which of course contributes to Black poverty.

6. Oh, and White indentured servants who were freed are awarded fifty acres of property, of course contributing to White prosperity.

Enslavers became more open to these ideas over time, right up until the First Great Awakening, which swept through the colonies in the 1730s, spearheaded by a Connecticut man named Jonathan Edwards.

THIS IS THE WAY LIFE WORKS. THINGS GROW AND

change, or at least things seem to change. Sometimes the change is in name only; sometimes there’s a fundamental shift. Most times it’s a bit of both. In the mid-1700s, after Cotton Mather’s death and in the midst of his followers’ continuing his legacy, the new America entered what we now call the Enlightenment era.

But to be enlightened just means to be informed. To be free from ignorance. So, this new movement, the Enlightenment, was megaphoning the fact that there was a new generation, a new era that knew more. Better thinkers. And in America the leader of this “better thinkers” movement was Mr. One-Hundred-Dollar Bill himself—Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin started a club called the American

Philosophical Society in 1743 in Philadelphia. It was modeled after the Royal Society in England, and served as, basically, a club for smart (White) people. Thinkers. Philosophers. And… racists. See, in the Enlightenment era, light was seen as a metaphor for intelligence (think, I see the light) and also whiteness (think, opposite of dark). And this is what Franklin was bringing to Amer...

About Jefferson. You know...

Gomes Eanes de Zurara was the world’s first racist? Well, Thomas Jefferson might’ve been the world’s first White person to say, “I have Black friends.” I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m willing to make the bet. He was raised nonreligious, in a house where Native Americans were houseguests, and Black people, though slaves, were his friends, as far as he could tell. As a young man, he didn’t think of them as less or consider slavery much at all. As a matter of...

telling him about the horrors of slavery—including the terror in his own home—that he realized their lives were more different than he’d ever known. And how could they not be? His father owned the second-largest number of enslaved people in Albemarle County, ...

He eventually went on to build his own plantation, in Charlottesville, Virginia, putting

money over morals, a lesson learned from his father. Slavery wasn’t about people, it was about profit. Business.

Phillis Wheatley was under a microscope, for being “special.” Not, like, literally under a microscope. She was too big for that. Not microscopic at all. As a matter of fact, she was being studied not because she was small but rather because she had an intellectual and creative bigness that White people couldn’t believe.

She was a poet. But before she was a poet, she was a young girl, a captive brought over on a ship from Senegambia. She was purchased by the Wheatley family, who wanted a daughter to replace the one they’d lost. Phillis would be that stand-in. And because she was a “daughter,” she was actually never a working slave and was even homeschooled. By eleven, she’d written her first poem. By twelve, she could read Greek and Latin classics, English literature, and the Bible. That same year she also published her first poem.

As they were. And, of course, she answered every question correctly and proved herself… human.

People like Benjamin Rush, a physician from Philadelphia who wrote a pamphlet saying that Black people weren’t born savages but instead were made savages by slavery. Record scratch.

To say that slavery—or, in today’s time, poverty—makes Black people animals or subhuman is racist. I know, I know. It seems

to be coming from a “good” place. Like, when people say, “You’re cute… for a (insert physical attribute that shouldn’t be used as an insult but is definitely used as an insult because it doesn’t fit with the strange and narrow European standard of beauty).” It’s underhanded and still doesn’t recognize you for you. It’s the difference between an assimilationist and an antiracist (word check!).