Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

“Ibn Khaldun did not intend merely to demean African people as inferior. He intended to belittle all the different-looking African and Slavic peoples whom the Muslims were trading as slaves. Even so, he reinforced the conceptual foundation for racist ideas. On the eve of the fifteenth century, Khaldun helped bolster the foundation for assimilationist ideas, for racist notions of the environment producing African inferiority. All an enslaver had to do was to stop justifying Slavic slavery and inferiority using climate theory, and focus the theory on African people, for the racist attitude toward dark-skinned people to be complete.” 

Kendi explains that Ibn Khaldun and other thinkers centuries before America’s existence wrote about and worked to justify slavery through an environmental theory of racial difference. Without race, people from farther-distant countries were inherently less developed; enslavement was not yet connected to race, but location defined a person’s merit.

“Assimilationists argued monogenesis: that all humans were one species descended from a single human creation in Europe’s Garden of Eden. Segregationists argued polygenesis: that there were multiple origins of multiple human species.” 

As the ideas develop in the 17th century, Kendi defines the two schools of thought about human origins that came to define scientific debate about race. Separate political groups took hold of polygenesis and monogenesis, regardless of the religious implications of abandoning monogenesis. Because of the implications, this debate would continue for hundreds of years. 

“Throughout the social tumult of the 1690s, Mather obsessed over maintaining the social hierarchies by convincing the lowly that God and nature had put them there, whether it applied to women, children, enslaved Africans, or poor people.” 

Mather’s abolitionist call to blacks to accept their position in life was somewhat progressive for the time—a notion that may seem impossible now. His overarching vision of God’s providence meant that while educating black people was fine, the degree to which they could approach superior whiteness would always be limited. This racial vision became fact for assimilationists.

“Rush was the first activist to commercialize the persuasive, though racist, abolitionist theory that slavery made Black people inferior. Whether benevolent or not, any idea that suggests that Black people as a group are inferior, that something is wrong with Black people, is a racist idea. Slavery was killing, torturing, raping, and exploiting people, tearing apart families, snatching precious time, and locking captives in socioeconomic desolation. The confines of enslavement were producing Black people who were intellectually, psychologically, culturally, and behaviorally different, not inferior.” 

Benjamin Rush’s idea, that “slavery made Black people inferior,” becomes common in the 19th century. But Kendi reminds his readers that seeing environment as producing categorical inferiority, rather than simply difference, is an important distinction to make.

“The strategy of what can be termed uplift suasion was based on the idea that White people could be persuaded away from their racist ideas if they saw Black people improving their behavior, uplifting themselves from their low station in American society. The burden of race relations was placed squarely on the shoulders of Black Americans. Positive Black behavior, abolitionist strategies held, undermined racist actions, and negative Black behavior confirmed them.” 

Abolitionist ideas of uplift suasion were intended to “persuade away” prejudice. It became a tactic used for hundreds of years and into the present day, though evidence of its efficacy is lacking. Kendi importantly notes that it displaced the “burden of race relations” onto black people in order to enact the change that it expected.

“For many, the colonization movement gave a new urgency to the idea of uplift suasion. Racist free Blacks thought uplift suasion offered Black people a way to prove their worthiness to White elites.” 

The colonization movement, an idea first produced in the 18th century, was vehemently opposed by most black people. Uplift suasion was supposed to be a tactic to convince whites that they could coexist with blacks, and “racist Blacks” worked to live by whites’ terms in order to keep themselves in the country.

“Agitated by a Virginia legislator’s earlier reference to slavery as a ‘lesser evil,’ Calhoun rose to ‘take higher ground.’ Once and for all, Calhoun wanted to bury that old antislavery Jeffersonian concept. ‘I hold that […] the relation now existing in slaveholding States between the two [races], is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good,’ he said. Calhoun went on to explain that it was both a positive good for society and a positive good for subordinate black people. Slavery, Calhoun suggested, was racial progress.” 

John C. Calhoun’s claim that slavery “was both a positive good for society and a positive good for subordinate black people” is the kind of justification of slavery that led to southern secession. It reframed the conversation to allow for Blackness to be inherently inferior, and for whites to be an integral part of a hierarchical order that preserved privilege. This sense of ordering reappears in less overt forms in many kinds of racial thought.

“The South had millions of acres of land that were worth more in purely economic terms than the almost 4 million enslaved human beings who were toiling on its plantations in 1860. With their financial investments in the institution of slavery and their dependence on its productivity, northern lenders and manufacturers were crucial sponsors of slavery.” 

Civil War politics became complex, given the entanglement of the whole nation in the issue of slavery. Lincoln, who bent to the demands of many lobbyists and business leaders, had to balance any actions he undertook with the demand to reunify the nation as soon as possible. His desire for reunification took precedence over any motion for immediate, effective emancipation and punishment of the Confederacy.

“Southern Blacks defended themselves in the war of re-enslavement, lifted up demands for rights and land, and issued brilliant antiracist retorts to the prevailing racist ideas. If any group should be characterized as ‘lazy,’ it was the planters, who had ‘lived in idleness all their lives on stolen labor,’ resolved a Petersburg, Virginia, mass meeting.” 

The rhetoric of calling black people “lazy” began early in the history of enslavement and continues today. But for those historians (and contemporaries) who seek to reframe history from an antiracist perspective, it is important to see that the roots of this idea have no empirical basis.

“Black and White HBCU founders assumed New England’s Latin and Greek curriculum to be the finest, and they only wanted the finest for their students.” 

The assimilationist move of HBCU founders to emulate white colleges and universities would later become a hot topic for antiracist thinkers. Where colleges and universities became places to help usher black people into colorism and double consciousness, later in the 20th century, they became the home to antiracist intellectual movements like Afrocentrism and Critical Race Studies. 

“Whereas Du Bois wanted to educate Americans about the capacity of Black people for the higher pursuits, Booker T. Washington, the calculating thirty-eight-year-old principal of Tuskegee, wanted Black people to publicly focus on the lower pursuits, which was much more acceptable to White Americans.” 

The divide between Du Bois and Washington was well publicized, and their mutual dislike famous. Du Bois’s dominating thought, at the beginning of the 20th century, was that a small number of exceptional black people, the “Talented Tenth,” could become equal with whites. Washington, meanwhile, played into the desire of white Americans to view black people as inherently, and intellectually, separate from whites. Du Bois would later become more “radical” and shift past this assimilationism.

“Du Bois’s theory of double-consciousness finally gave many [Black readers] the glasses they needed to see—to see themselves, to see their own inner struggles.” 

Double-consciousness is a critical idea for embodying the sense of seeing oneself both as a black person and through the eyes of white people. Though antiracism promotes the idea of single consciousness from the black perspective, Kendi notes that double-consciousness became a critical framework for blacks to work through their operations in America and to help find antiracist, singly-conscious activist footing.

“The Talented Tenth’s attempt at media suasion was a lost cause from the start. While ‘negative’ portrayals of Black people often reinforced racist ideas, ‘positive’ portrayals did not necessarily weaken racist ideas. The ‘positive’ portrayals could be dismissed as extraordinary Negroes, and the ‘negative’ portrayals could be generalized as typical.” 

The uplift suasion of the 20th century, enacted through a push to place positive, not negative, images of Blackness in the media (in contrast to the Blues and Niggerati movements), was intended to manage black relations with white people and win over whites. Kendi notes that this approach continues to fail, just as it had 200 years before.

“Protecting the freedom brand of the United States became more important for northern politicians than sectional unity and securing segregationists’ votes. In addition, exploiting foreign resources became more important for northern tycoons than exploiting southern resources.” 

The emergence of the “freedom brand,” intended to show America as a keeper of global freedom after World War Two, shifted politicians’ attention toward civil rights out of self-interest and foreign relations interest. Southern segregationists continued to pursue violent rejection of integration, despite politicians’ calls for racial progress.

“Most Americans did not consider assimilationists to be racists. They did not consider northern segregation and racial disparities to be indicative of racist policies, and the avalanche of antiracist protests for jobs, housing, education, and justice from Boston to Los Angeles in 1963 hardly changed their views on the matter.” 

In the era of desegregation, Kendi notes, racism came to be viewed as a “southern problem.” As a result, black people’s desire to point out discrimination was neutralized and easily rejected in other spaces in which large communities experienced discrimination. This is a step in the journey toward the rhetoric proclaiming the end of racism in America.

“The Birmingham murders signified the massive resistance to the civil rights movement and the naked ugliness of American racism. As the brutality turned negative eyes to the United States in the decolonizing world, the stakes were raised for civil rights legislation to reassure the American freedom brand, forcing Kennedy’s hand.” 

The “freedom brand” continued to grow in importance during the Cold War. After the Birmingham bombing, Kennedy was “forced” to admit extreme regret and apologize internationally. Johnson, who succeeded him, called the Civil Rights Act a “memorial” to Kennedy, though it was hardly a first-choice issue, in many ways demonstrating the power of international public relations on domestic policy.

“King’s death transformed countless doubly conscious activists into singly conscious antiracists, and Black Power suddenly grew into the largest antiracist mass mobilization since the post-Civil War period, when demands for land had been the main issue.” 

Where Du Bois’s double consciousness seemed to define King’s brand of civil rights activism, King’s assassination strengthened Black Power. Kendi notes that the progression toward Black Power accelerated as conditions for black people worsened, and an act of violence against a leader of nonviolent resistance threw the discussion in a new direction.

“Reagan fought down all those empowerment movements fomenting in his home state of California and across the nation. Hardly any other Republican politician could match his law-and-order credentials, and hardly any other Republican politician was more despised by antiracists.” 

Reagan’s fame for “peace” and “order” meant something different to antiracists and blacks than it did to most whites. The unequal burden of his policies, placed upon black people, rendered him almost wholly disapproved of by African Americans. 

“Criminologists hardly feared that the new war would disproportionately arrest and incarcerate African Americans. Many criminologists were publishing fairytales for studies that found that racial discrimination no longer existed in the criminal justice system.” 

Reagan’s War on Drugs did not, ostensibly, seem to suggest mass incarceration of black people, and especially black males. But once unequal punishments of black people seemed to show up in incarceration statistics, they undid the “fairytales” that lauded the act as universally helpful. In the interim, black males were imprisoned in unprecedented numbers, disrupting families, communities and societal progress for black Americans. 

“At the end of that volcanic summer [of 1995], the vast majority of African Americans were supportive of the doubly conscious Million Man March, doubly conscious of racist and antiracist ideas. Arguably, its most pervasively popular organizing principle was personal responsibility, the call for Black men to take more personal responsibility for their lives, their families, their neighborhoods, and their Black nation.” 

The rhetoric of personal responsibility, a racist idea, blended with a strong antiracist organization of black people in 1995. Though the Million Man March had strong detractors, including feminist Angela Davis, it did work to connect black men in a time of oppressive violence. Kendi mediates between the positive and negative valences of the movement in Part 5. 

“The refrain of ‘White blood’ and ‘Black diseases’ should have ceased, and the segregationist chorus saying that human beings were created unequal, that played for five centuries, should have also ceased. Science did not start the singing, though, and science would not stop it.”

After the Human Genome Project was announced in 2000, Kendi notes that science essentially put to rest the idea of scientific difference between races. However, the .1 percent difference remained an obsession of some scientists, who were neither the source nor the end of racist thought, but rather another way of perpetuating the same sort of racism that had been about for centuries.

“The extraordinary-Negro hallmark had come a mighty long way from Phyllis Wheatley to Barack Obama, who became the nation’s only African American in the US Senate in 2005. Since Wheatley, segregationists had despised these extraordinary-Negro exhibits of Black capacity and had done everything to take them down. But Obama—or rather Obama’s era—was different. Segregationists turned their backs on their predecessors and adored the Obama exhibit as a proclamation of the end of racism.” 

The instinct to treat black people as exhibitions—as Other, inferior, and to be gawked at—is a long and seemingly unending legacy that applied even to Barack Obama, and was applied to him by even the person that Obama would pick as a running mate.

“Antiracists should stop connecting selfishness to racism, and unselfishness to antiracism. Altruism is wanted, not required. Antiracists do not have to be altruistic. Antiracists do not have to be selfless. Antiracists merely have to have intelligent self-interest, and to stop consuming those racist ideas that have engendered so much unintelligent self-interest over the years.” 

Kendi’s call to action disavows the sense that white people, or any people, have to sacrifice well-being in order to put antiracist belief into action. The idea of sacrifice, or losing out, in order to promote antiracist thought in America is pervasive, he notes, and false, and simply furthers racist thought in America.