Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

by Jason Reynolds

bigger skulls and therefore greater intellectual capacity, which, by the way, was how I combated being told all my life that I have a big head. Yeah, because I got a big brain. I never knew I was a scientist!

also didn’t know I was… insane. I’m not. But if I were alive and free back then, there’s a good chance I would’ve been labeled as such. The US Census report of 1840 said that free Blacks were insane and enslaved Blacks were sane, and that biracial people had shorter life sp...

The propaganda just kept coming. Anything to justify supremacy and slavery.

And if bunk literature and false “studies” were the breakbeats of racism—looped samples pulsing on and on—then John C. Calhoun, a senator from South Carolina, was the emcee for slavery—an effective one—there to rock the racist crowd. Calhoun was fighting

even for Texas to become a slave state in the 1844 election. He was running for office and angry that congressmen were even debating emancipation. Possibly ending slavery? An outrage! Calhoun eventually pulled out of the race, and it’s a good thing he did, because William Lloyd G...

See, it’s one thing to talk around slavery. To talk about how the slaves lived, and what they were thinking, and how good they had it. It’s ano...

tell his own story. There was a new “special” Black person on the scene. A new Black exhibit. A new Phillis Wheatley, but this time not in need of a publisher. Garrison would be that. That man’s name was Frederick Douglass. In June 1845, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave was published. It outlined Douglass’s life and gave a firsthand account of the horrors of slavery. It was a hit, and a neces...

benevolent Christians that the likes of Zurara and Cotton Mather worked so hard to portray. It was also meant to gain some kind of White sympathy. But Douglass was a runaway slave with a book about being a runaway slave, which meant he’d basically snitched on himself and needed to run farther away. So, he went to Great Britain and spread his antislavery message there, while in A...

In fact, the telling of his story sparked the telling of many others, including one about an enslaved woman—The Narrative of Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth was a former slave with the moxie of a woman slaveholder. The kind of woman who would stand up in a room full of White people and declare her humanity.

The book was called Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The author, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin exploded and became the biggest book of its time. Harriet Beecher Stowe became the J. K. Rowling of slave books.

But women were in support of Stowe. They were ready to fight for their rights and set the nation on fire.

Stowe was their gasoline.

And her novel was a time bomb that ticked and ticked and, after exp...

for a new political force, especially when it came to the conversation around s...

The Great Emancipator (hmmm), one of the best, or at least most, -known and -loved presidents in America’s history. That’s what we’re taught.

But Lincoln wasn’t that simple. As I mentioned at the start of this journey, life rarely fits neatly into a box. People are complicated and selfish and contradictory. I mean, if there’s anything we’ve learned from Thomas Jefferson, it’s that you can be antislavery and not antiracist. You cannot see Black people as people but know that mistreating and enslaving them are bad for business. Bad for your brand. Bad for your opportunity. That’s more in line of who Lincoln was.

Before he ever won, he lost. Got spanked in a Senate race in 1858 by a man named Stephen Douglas. Douglas was proslavery. Lincoln was fighting on behalf of the abolitionist movement—because you can’t win if

you don’t have an opposing view to debate—and the Free Soilers, the people who believed slavery should not continue to extend west. The two men debated, and Douglas, slick tongued and sharp suited, wiped the racist floor with Lincoln and won the election.

Though Lincoln was defeated, there was an obvious change in opinion in the country. A shift. Lincoln shifted with the shift and started to preach that slavery needed to end—but not because of the human horror. Because if lab...

do to make money? If you weren’t one of the wealthy White people who owned slaves, slavery didn’t necessarily work in your favor. Lincoln was sp...

On one hand, he wanted slavery gone. Black people liked that. On another hand, he didn’t think Black people should necessarily have equal rights. Racists loved that. And then, on a third hand (a foot, maybe?), he argued that the end of slavery would bolster the poor White...

case where no one could trust him (Garrison definitely didn’t), but everyone kinda… wanted to. And when Lincoln lost, he’d still made a splash as his party, the Republican Party, won many of the House seats in the states that were antislavery. So much so, that Garrison, though critical of Lincoln, kept his critiques to hims...

There were still racists in the North. Still racists everywhere. And why would racists want to vote for the party “in support” of Black people? So, Lincoln changed his tune. Or maybe he just sang the whole song while running for president. Lincoln was against Black voting. Lincoln was against racial equality. Lincoln and the party pledged not to challenge southern slavery. And Lincoln won.

started with South Carolina. They left the Union. Which means they were starting their own territory, where they could make up their own rules and live their lives as racist as they wanted. Shortly thereafter, the rest of the South joined in on the disjoining. This was a big deal, because to lose an entire region meant the other states

lost that region’s resources. All that land. Those crops. Those people. That wealth. But it happened, and the split-offs called themselves the Confederacy. They voted in their own president, Jefferson Davis, who had declared that Black people should never and would never be equal to Whites. There were now two governments, like rival gangs. And what have gangs always done when one gang feels their turf is being threatened? FIGHT! Welcome to the Civil War.

slaves wanted to fight against their slave owners, and therefore join Northern soldiers in battle. They wanted the chance to fight against the thing that had been beating them, raping them, killing them. So, the first chance they got, they ran. They ran, ran, ran by the droves. They ran north to cross into the Union and join the Union army. Anything for freedom. And then got sent back. Anyth...

be returned to their owners. This was the summer of 1861. But by the summer of 1862, the slave act had been repealed and a bill passed that declared all Confederate-owned Africans who escaped to Union lines or who resided in territories occupied by the Union to be “forever free of their servitude.” And it was this bill that would morph into an even bolder bill by Lincoln just five days later. “All persons held as sl...

Lincoln was labeled the Great Emancipator, but really, Black people were emancipating themselves. By the end of 1863, four hundred thousand Black people had escaped their plantations and found Union lines. M...

Or at least the potenti...

The Union believed most of the same hype about Black people as the Confederacy.

The only difference was they’d pushed past owning them a little sooner. But their feelings toward Black people—that they were lazy and savage and blah, blah, blah—were the same. On top of that, there were many Black people who feared that freedom would be nothing without land. What good was it to be free if they had nowhere to go and no way to build a life for themselves? And what about voting? These were a couple of the questions at hand, a few of the issues Lincoln was trying to work through. What he was comfortable with, however, was the way Black people praised