Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

by Jason Reynolds

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.

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.

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.

Africans are savages because Africa is hot, and extreme weather made them that way. 2. Africans are savages because they were cursed through Ham, in the Bible.

Africans are savages because they were created as an entirely different species. 4. Africans are savages because there is a natural human hierarchy and they are at the bottom. 5. Africans are savages because dark equals dumb and evil, and light equals smart and… White. 6. Africans are savages because slavery made them so. 7. Africans are savages.

Basically, live like White people. If Black people behaved “admirably,” they could prove all the stereotypes about them were wrong.

It’s important that you keep this in mind, because it would be the cornerstone of assimilationist thought, which basically said: Make yourself small, make yourself unthreatening,

make yourself the same, make yourself safe, make yourself quiet, to make White people comfortable with your existence.

They’d built America as slaves and wanted to reap the benefits of their labor as free people. America was now their land.

The reason he’d turned such a sharp corner was, perhaps, because the country had entered into the Great Depression. No one had money. But it’s one thing to have no money. It’s another thing to have no money and no freedom. So Black people were experiencing a kind of double Depression. And even though the sitting president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, had developed an initiative called the New Deal, a flurry of government relief programs and job programs to keep people afloat, Black people needed their own New Deal to keep them safe from the old deal, which was the racist deal, which was no deal at all.

He argued that though White people weren’t born racist, America was built to make them that way. And that if they wanted to fight against it, they had to address it with the other racist White people around them.

After the Civil Rights Act came the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And though it would cause what every bit of progress caused, White rage and resistance, the Voting Rights Act would become the most effective piece of antiracist legislation ever passed by the Congress of the United States of America.

Law and order.

It goes back to things like the word ghetto. And today, maybe you’ve heard urban. Or how about undesirables? Oh, and my favorite (not), dangerous elements. Which would eventually become thugs. My mother would call this “gettin’ over,” but for the sake of this not history history book, let’s go with what the historians have named it: the “southern strategy.” And, in fact, it was—and remained over the next five decades—the national strategy Republicans used to unite northern and southern racists, war hawks, and fiscal and social conservatives.

Two years into Reagan’s presidency, he issued one of the most devastating executive orders of the twentieth century. The War on Drugs. Its role, maximum punishment for drugs like marijuana. This war was really one on Black people. At the time, drug crime was declining. As a matter of fact, only 2 percent of Americans viewed drugs as America’s most pressing problem. Few believed that marijuana was even that dangerous, especially compared with the much more addictive heroin. But President Reagan wants to go to war? Against drugs?

Reagan doubled down on the War on Drugs by passing the Anti–Drug Abuse Act. This bill gave a minimum five-year sentence for a drug dealer or drug user caught with five grams of crack, the amount typically handled by Blacks and poor people, while the mostly White and rich users and dealers of powder cocaine—who operated in neighborhoods with fewer police—had to be caught with five hundred grams to receive the same five-year minimum sentence.

Let that sink in. Same drug. Different form. One gets five years in prison if caught with five grams (the size of two quarters). The other gets five years in prison for five hundred grams (the size of a brick).

The results should be obvious. Mass incarceration of Black people, even though White people and Black people were selling and using drugs at similar rates. Not to mention police officers policed Black neighborhoods more, and the more police, the more arrests. It’s not rocket science. It’s racism. And it would, once again, tear the Black community apart. More Black men were going to prison, and when (if) they came home, it was without the right to vote. No political voice. Also, no jobs. Not just because of felon...

And the media, as always, drove the stereotypes without discussing the racist framework that created much of them. Once again, Black people were lazy and violent, the men were absent from the home because they were irresponsible and careless, and the Black family was withering due to all this, but especially, according to Reagan, because of welfare. There was no evidence to support any of this, but hey, who needs evidence when you have power, right?

unwavering in her search for antiracist explanations when others took the easier and racist way of Black blame.

Ten days later, President Bill Clinton endorsed, basically, a new slavery. A “three strikes and you’re out” law. It was called the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, giving hard time to certain three-time offenders, which ended up causing the largest increase of the prison population in US history, mostly on nonviolent drug offenses. Mostly Black men.

(I wish there was something new to add. But, as you can see, the entire history was a recycling of the same racist ideas. Not the most original people, those racists.)

And Black women had something to say. A nudge. You know, to get the conversation started. And when I say Black women, what I mean is… one million of them. On October 25, 1997, in Philadelphia, a million Black women gathered to have their voices heard. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Sister Souljah, Winnie Mandela, Attallah and Ilyasah Shabazz (daughters of Malcolm X), and Dorothy Height all spoke. But so did White men. Not at the march, but in the media. And what they argued in response to Clinton’s statements was that the way to fix racism was to stop focusing on it.

Take a breath. How many of you know the “I have a Black friend” person, who then follows that statement with this one: “But I don’t see color.”

Scientific evidence that the races are 99.9 percent the same was brought forth on June 26, 2000. The year 2000 was when people were given scientific evidence that human beings were the same, despite the color of their skin. Isn’t that wild?

“The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis,” Venter said. His research team at Celera Genomics had determined “the genetic code” of five individuals, who were identified as either “Hispanic, Asian, Caucasian, or African American,” and the scientists could not tell one race from another.

And though it was called No Child Left Behind, it actually encouraged mechanisms that decreased funding to schools when students were not making improvements, thus leaving the neediest students behind.

I've been saying this for years!!!