Ibram X. Kendi, in Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, traces the history of thought about race in America, from the earliest days to the present, "... from their origins in fifteenth-century Europe, through colonial times when the early British settlers carried racist ideas to America, all the way to the twenty-first century and current debates about the events taking place on our streets." The book itself draws its title from a statement about race: "... from a speech that Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis gave on the floor of the US Senate on April 12, 1860. This future president of the Confederacy objected to a bill funding Black education in Washington, DC. 'This Government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes,' but 'by white men for white men,' Davis lectured his colleagues. The bill was based on the false notion of racial equality, he declared. The 'inequality of the white and black races' was 'stamped from the beginning.' "
Kendi structures his observations into five historical periods, characterising each period as, in a way, a conversation with the ideas on race of five American intellectuals: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis. He carefully weaves the development of each individual's thoughts on race into the historical events of their times, comparing and contrasting their views with other intellectuals of their times, showing both the influences on their ideas, and their influence on events and the ideas of others. While his focus is on ideas about racism, he makes a consistent attempt to identify the ways in which gender and queerness intersect with race. This results in various critiques throughout the book of the ways in which racist and heterosexist ideas and practices differently affect Black men and Black women, the ways in which sexism and hetersexism have influenced Black anti-racist thought about women, gender, and Black queerness, and the ways in which feminist movements and thinkers have engaged in racist thought and action.
In exploring the range of ideas about race that have influenced and driven American culture, society and politics, Kendi identifies three general strands of thought - segregationalists, assimilationists, and antiracists:
"But even before Thomas Jefferson and the other founders declared independence, Americans were engaging in a polarizing debate over racial disparities, over why they exist and persist, and over why White Americans as a group were prospering more than Black Americans as a group. Historically, there have been three sides to this heated argument. 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. During the ongoing debate over police killings, these three sides to the argument have been on full display. Segregationists have been blaming the recklessly criminal behavior of the Black people who were killed by police officers. Michael Brown was a monstrous, threatening thief; therefore Darren Wilson had reason to fear him and to kill him. Antiracists have been blaming the recklessly racist behavior of the police. The life of this dark-skinned eighteen-year-old did not matter to Darren Wilson. Assimilationists have tried to have it both ways. Both Wilson and Brown acted like irresponsible criminals."
Kendi takes aim at the generally accepted belief that ignorance and hatred are the basis for the development of racist ideas, which then are manifested in policies that end in racial discrimination. He argues instead that the self-interest - political, economic, and cultural - of the elite white classes leads to the adoption of policies that discriminate and oppress along racial lines, which supports the development of racist ideologues, which create ignorance of and hatred toward racialised groups.
The precursor to racist ideas, Kendi argues, can be found in Aristotle's justifications for the Greek practice of slavery, which holds that, while al non-Greeks are barbarians, peoples from extreme climates are in particular inferior to Greeks because of the environment they live in. Variations on these ideas - that people from other cultures are inferior, and people from distant places where the physical conditions are different are even more so - were later used to justify slavery in the Roman and Muslim spheres of influence. A second source of racist thought may be identified in the Biblical story story of Noah's son Ham, the progenitor of African peoples and other dark-skinned peoples, who 'looked on his father's nakedness.' As punishment, Ham, his son Canaan, and their descendants were cursed by God. The darker complexions of Africans and other non-Europeans were seen as a mark of the curse and of their inherited inferiority.
Initially, slavery in Christian Europe, like that in Muslim countries, involved both black Africans and
Eastern European Slavic peoples. However, in the 15th century, the pattern began to shift as the sea trade with coastal Africa increased significantly (and the Slavs embarked on fort building to discourage Turkish slave raids), black slaves became the norm and racist justifications for slavery derived from initial idea of the 'curse of Ham' dominated the discourse. With the 'discovery' and later colonisation of the Americas by Europeans, concurrent with the increasing colonisation and exploitation of African nations, the racist narrative of the inferiority and natural role as slaves of dark peoples - both African and indigenous American - became the established thinking on race among Europeans and American colonists.
As slavery became a necessary institution for the provision of cheap labour in the colonies, the previously existing racist idea of African peoples as barbaric and hypersexualised was extended, with stress on the sexual aggressiveness of black women. This served to excuse the rape of female slaves. Kendi notes that the law - which in British tradition had long held that a child takes on the social status of the father - was explicitly reversed, ensuring that children born of such rape were seen as slaves, and hence additions to the available cheap labour pool, like their mothers. At the same time, sexual contact between white women and black men of any status was prohibited.
European law at the beginning of the colonial period held that Christians might be indentured, but could not be enslaved. Thus at first there was little pressure to convert slaves to Christianity, and much resistance. Indeed, many slave-owners and segregationalists in general argued that for various reasons - barbarism, lower intellectual capacity, even the presumed lack of a fully developed soul, Africans could not by their natures become Christians. Christian assimilationists, wanting to save black souls without threatening the economic status quo, began to argue that Africans had been brought by historical necessity into slavery so that their masters might convert them - thus making them more docile slaves. Laws were passed that explicitly stated that converting someone already a slave would not change their legal status in any way; Virginia's 1667 statute declared that "the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage.”
With the approach of the Enlightenment and he beginning of 'scientific' thinking about race, two opposing theories of human origins, monogenesis and polygenesis, emerged. Monogenesis - usually associated with assimilationist thinking on racism - held that all humans had the same origin. On the other hand, polygenesis - a clearly segregationalist narrative - put forward various theories concerning the origins of the different races; the one consistent element of these theories was the idea that Africans did not share an origin with white peoples - indeed, they often argued that Africans and great apes shared an origin.
Repeatedly, "altruistic" attitudes toward African slaves - the idea, for instance, that despite their presumed barbarism, their souls were capable of salvation - were advanced, only to be countered by either segregationalist narratives, or laws that ensured that no degree of altruism might interfere with the economic interests of land/slave holders. Slavery was cast as both legal and permissible under Biblical precedent - thus criminalising any black person who sought their own freedom. "No matter what African people did, they were barbaric beasts or brutalized like beasts. If they did not clamor for freedom, then their obedience showed they were naturally beasts of burden. If they nonviolently resisted enslavement, they were brutalized. If they killed for their freedom, they were barbaric murderers."
As the abolitionist movement grew, both in England and in what would become the United States, new ideas entered the public discourse on race. Abolitionists put forward the argument that while Africans were inferior - thus supporting racist perceptions - it was so because of the conditions of slavery. Pro-slavery voices expanded upon the concept of polygenesis, giving reason upon reason for their conviction that black people were of a different species altogether from white people. Kendi pays particular attention to Thomas Jefferson's writings on both the justification for the American revolution and his support for the continued enslavement of Africans in America. The notion of colonisation - creating a new nation in Africa for free American blacks (as Britain had done in Sierra Leone) added further nuances to ideas about the nature, capabilities and potentials of black people, and the possibility of a state in which free blacks co-existed with whites.
As the middle of the 19th century approached, with the Civil War still some decades away, the multitude of positions on black Americans included wholehearted advocates of slavery, 'gradual abolitionists' who wanted a slow end to slavery, those who wanted to immediately abolish slavery but limit the civil rights of blacks until they were 'ready' to exercise them, those who demanded immediate abolition and full enfranchisement, and those who supported abolition only if free blacks were deported to the new African colony of Liberia.
Kendi demonstrates how new developments in scientific understanding consistently came to be used against the possibility that blacks and whites could be equal. Darwin's Origin of Species may not have addressed human evolution, but even while it provided the means of dismantling the popular theory of polygenesis, it was used to argue that whites were superior to blacks due to natural selection. Sir Francis Galton's work in mathematics led to the understanding of statistics, but his strong pro-nature stance in the nature vs. nurture debate led to the creation of eugenics as a sociopolitical position, and Sir Herbert Spencer's championing of Darwin's theories resulted in the concept of 'social Darwinism' - two ideas that were easily used to counter any attempts to 'improve' the situation of slaves or free blacks in America. When Darwin at last turned to the subject of the evolution of the human species, his thinking on race was sufficiently ambiguous that "Both assimilationists and segregationists hailed Descent of Man. Assimilationists read Darwin as saying Blacks could one day evolve into White civilization; segregationists read him as saying Blacks were bound for extinction."
Kendi does not shy away from critiquing the positions of Black intellectuals or the Black elite - middle-class or wealthy, often Northern, educated professionals and entrepreneurs - on the issue of race. The 1890s were a time when Black public intellectuals began to have a greater voice in the national conversation on race in America. Sadly, many members of the Black elite were assimilationists who had internalised racist thinking about themselves, or about 'lower class' blacks who needed to be 'raised up' from the state to which they had descended during slavery.
The 'voice' chosen by Kendi to frame the conversation on race during the late 19th and early to mid 29th century is W. E. B. Du Bois, whose own understanding of race changed significantly during that time. In the 1890s, when Black intellectuals were gaining prominence, W. E. B. Du Bois was a young man whose anti-racist vision had not yet matured. Du Bois had studied in Germany and, on returning to the US, at Harvard, and, as Kendi explains,
"He had grown more accustomed to meeting “not white folks, but folks.” He mentally climbed in Germany and stood on an equal plane with White people. But his new antiracist mind-set of not looking up at White people did not stop him from looking down at supposedly low-class Black people. It would take Du Bois much longer to see not low-class Black folks, but folks on an equal human plane with him and the rest of the (White) folks.
Du Bois accepted a position in 1894 teaching Greek and Latin at the A.M.E. Church’s flagship college in Ohio, Wilberforce. He was determined 'to begin a life-work, leading to the emancipation of the American Negro.' Somehow, some way, he maintained his faith that American racism could be persuaded and educated away. 'The ultimate evil was stupidity” about race by “the majority of white Americans,' he theorized. 'The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation.' "
The preeminent Black voice of the period was Booker T. Washington, "the calculating thirty-eight-year-old principal of Tuskegee, [who] wanted Black people to publicly focus on the lower pursuits, which was much more acceptable to White Americans. ... In private, Washington supported civil rights and empowerment causes across the South throughout his career. In public, his talking points reflected the New South racism that elites enjoyed hearing.
At the opening of the Cotton States International Exposition on September 18, 1895, Washington delivered the 'Atlanta Compromise.' He asked southern Whites to stop trying to push Blacks out of the house of America, and to allow them to reside comfortably in the basement—to help them to rise up, knowing that when they rose, the whole house would rise. Many of the landowners in the Atlanta audience had spent their lifetimes trying to convince their Black sharecroppers 'to dignify and glorify common labour.' So when Washington beckoned to them with the words, 'It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top,' they were overjoyed. Rest assured, Washington said, 'the wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly.' "
It is interesting to note that anti-racist thought seemed to be most fully developed among Black women who had entered the realm of the public intellectual. Speaking about Booker T. Washington's assumption of the mantle of premier Black intellectual on the the death of Frederick Douglass, Kendi says: "Ida B. Wells would have been a better replacement, but she was a woman, and too antiracist for most Americans."
"Wells knew that immoral constructions about Black women hindered them from fully engaging in the burgeoning women’s club moral movement that cascaded across the 1890s. 'I sometimes hear of a virtuous Negro woman, but the idea is absolutely inconceivable to me,' wrote an anonymous 'southern White woman' in The Independent. Oberlin graduate and teacher Anna Julia Cooper took it upon herself to defend Black womanhood and encourage Black women’s education in A Voice from the South in 1892. Like Wells, Cooper wrote in the antiracist feminist tradition. 'The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country,' Cooper explained. 'She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or unacknowledged factor in both.' And yet, Cooper did espouse some class racism. She praised, for instance, the 'quiet, chaste dignity and decorous solemnity' of the Protestant Episcopal Church, while demeaning the 'semi-civilized religionism' of low-income Black southerners.
Southern white men were 'shielding' themselves 'behind the plausible screen of defending the honor [of their women]' through lynchings in order to “palliate” their record of hate and violence, Ida B. Wells maintained in Southern Horrors, and again during her 1893 anti-lynching tour of England. Her speaking tour was an embarrassment to White Americans. In her work, Wells more or less condemned the strategy of uplift suasion and championed armed Black self-defense to stop lynchings. 'The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs,' she declared, 'the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged, lynched.' "
Throughout much of the first half of the 20th century, the predominant thinking about race remained either segregationalist or assimilationist in nature. Du Bois, disenchanted by his efforts to raise the condition of Blacks through education and 'suasion,' slowly came to realise that racism had to be confronted directly, that nothing Blacks did to become 'more like Whites' was going to change the engrained white supremacist position. Other anti-racist thinkers - Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, James Baldwin - joined him in rejecting assimilationism and the notion that Black people had to 'improve' themselves in order to earn equality with whites.
Post-war America found itself in the position of presenting itself internationally as the beacon of freedom while domestically still in an era of Jim Crow and deep racial inequities. It became a matter of national image to at least give the impression of moving towards racial equality and civil rights for all. Gestures such as school integration were attempted, provoking serious opposition in the South. Civil rights activists began staging demonstrations to draw attention to the need for action. In 1964, the US government went ahead with civil rights legislation, but in many ways the effects were superficial, and did not result in deep, systemic change. Kendi marshalls a powerful critique of civil rights 'gains' during this period: "... as much as the Civil Rights Act served to erect a dam against Jim Crow policies, 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. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 managed to bring on racial progress and progression of racism at the same time."
In this post-war environment, new voices emerged to take up the national conversation on race: Elijah Mohammed and his protege, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, and the black anti-racists who would become the leaders of the Black Power movement, including Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis. Kendi follows these and other Black voices, and those who sought to diminish or silence them, through to the grassroots antiracist organising of BlackLivesMatter.
As his account of ideas about race moves forward through American history, Kendi examines each new stage in racial/racist thought with reference to the events which both contributed to and were bolstered or opposed by it. His research is detailed and exhaustive, making for a book that is immensely informative but best explored slowly and thoughtfully. Looking at American history through this lens of its ideas about race is a difficult but important experience for the white reader. Events we thought we understood, at least in general, take on different meanings and perspectives; backgrounded events take a new and more prominent place in the national narrative.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough for those who truly seek to understand the roots of racism in America.
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