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

Jefferson’s influential writings were confused and often contradictory on the matter of race. In the name of American freedom, he fought against British rule as a form of enslavement that “made American whites black,” but he also enslaved people (103). He held that blacks were inferior, but he also sustained an affair with his slave, Sally Hemings, for decades. He was, as Kendi calls him, an “antislavery antiabolitionist” (151).

Extremely well-read, Jefferson was part of an active community of thinkers that sought to taxonomize and understand blackness. “Exceptional negroes” and “Black exhibits” sought to win over people like Jefferson through “uplift suasion.” But Jefferson remained largely unmoved, and his texts (especially those written to European thinkers) betray no consistent line of thought.

One of Kendi’s most important notes about Jefferson is that he was both antislavery and anti-abolitionist. Through Jefferson, readers can connect to multiple different forms of racist thought and racial politics, but it’s difficult to sense his commitment to any antiracist platforms. Jefferson’s attachment to philosophical and scientific communities continued to draw him into conversations on race, but the public record shows disparities with his private thoughts. 

Before, during, and after the Civil War, William Lloyd Garrison’s passionate abolitionism influenced United States policy. Garrison was, in many ways, rebellious for the time, but he also upheld the ideas of uplift suasion, discriminated against black people in leadership, and pulled back from radical action during Reconstruction.

Initially, Garrison was pulled to abolitionism as an apolitical issue. He preferred uplift suasion and immediate change through culture, rather than politics. But he also pushed for immediate emancipation, which he was surprised to see, and he pinned the issue of slavery to a single, well-focused political agenda when it seemed possible. Kendi credits Garrison with the inextricable attachment of black enslavement to the political world.

Garrison came around to recognizing the role of racist ideas—not just black actions or negative white practices—in shaping black people’s status in the world just before his death. Garrison’s abolitionism had slowed down during the Reconstruction, but as the Reconstruction lost speed, Garrison noticed the intense shortcoming of a gradualist approach to race. 

Du Bois’s development from assimilationist paragon to radical antiracist thinker is vital to understanding racist thought in America. While Du Bois once lauded men like Jefferson Davis and Otto von Bismarck for their manly European strength, he ended his life in Africa, connected to socialist African political movements. As a young man, he focused in on the “Talented Tenth,” of which he was part, which could break down the separation between black and white at the highest level of learning. As an older man, he denounced this approach.

Du Bois first faced Booker T. Washington, who espoused segregationist ideas, and then Marcus Garvey, who was antiracist. The battle over culture that Du Bois and Garvey held was also a battle over respectability: with rising Ku Klux Klan violence, Du Bois believed that the public should only see positive, respectable images of blacks that appealed to whiteness. But as the Nation of Islam expanded and civil rights movements proliferated, Du Bois started to see the danger of appealing to white thinkers or Whiteness as a standard of beauty—the same standard that Garvey had rejected.

By the end of his life, Du Bois was a socialist antiracist who disavowed even King’s nonviolence as too weak to attend to the ills of racism and class discrimination. The day after Du Bois died, at the March on Washington, the crowd took a moment of silence to recognize a man who at different points in his life had influenced many, if not most, in the crowd. Ironically, the movement that organized the march was not radical enough for the man who had just died, but its leaders, like King, had been profoundly influenced by his powerful and well-circulated ideas.

Kendi refers to Davis as one of the most consistently and powerfully antiracist thinkers in American history. Founder of the black feminist movement and an anti-prison activist, and influential writer since the 1960s, Davis came into her activism through a line of Black Power family and friends. Her antiracist consciousness, built during her high school and college years at mostly-white institutions, has stayed with her throughout her life.

Davis spent significant time studying in Europe before she returned to join the Black Power movement in the 70s. She became a prison-rights activist when she joined the case of the Jackson Brothers; the outcome of this case landed her in prison and branded her as a Communist criminal for virtually the rest of her career. In prison, she began to imagine a black feminist movement that has since blossomed.

Davis ran as Vice Presidential candidate for the Communist Party when young, but she left the party later, citing its sexism and racism. She focused in on her activism, speaking up against both segregationists and assimilationists when she saw injustice enacted around her. 

Benjamin Rush, in 1773, was an abolitionist who first coined the idea that slavery made black people inferior. He saw this as a persuasive reason why they should be freed from enslavement. He furnished exhibits of excellent black people that were intended to persuade whites toward the growing goodness of black people, once blacks were educated. A doctor, Rush also learned of yellow fever vaccination practices from black people and then used their bodies to test and demonstrate the efficacy of the technique. 

Benjamin Franklin had a profound influence on American intellectual life and a profound influence on Thomas Jefferson. He was the “secular disciple” of Cotton Mather, and he claimed that slavery was simply “uneconomical,” rather than immoral, as part of his abolitionism. Franklin’s role in philosophical and scientific societies connects Mather to Jefferson.

Sarah Baartman was a Khoi woman from South Africa. Her enslaver, a local politician, transported her to England in 1807 after illustrations of her abnormally large buttocks and genitalia fascinated the British public. She was put on exhibition and posthumously dissected by Cuvier, a French scientist, as part of his study of her body. 

Wheatley was a prodigious poet and enslaved woman. In 1772, she went on trial over her poems, which courts claimed could not have been written by a person of African descent. She traveled overseas to London to find a publisher, because no American publisher was willing to face ire from racist readership.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was an abolitionist who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The figure of Uncle Tom, a pious and humble black man, became a stereotype of black masculinity carried forward from that time on. While white abolitionists praised the text, black people (particularly black men) did not appreciate the portrayal. Still, Stowe’s text made inroads with those who believed that slavery was the best or most godly position for black people. 

Sojourner Truth was the first intersectional black feminist, according to Kendi. As a participant in suffrage conversations, Truth stood up for the right of black women to participate in women’s rights movements. When black men applied sexist frames to those conversations, she rebuked those men. 

John C. Calhoun was the governor of South Carolina who led the charge for southern secession. He coined the idea that southern slavery was a “positive good.” 

Lincoln, known as the “Great Emancipator,” was the 16th President of the United States. Though he signed an order for immediate emancipation of enslaved peoples, thereby securing the title of emancipator for perpetuity, Kendi notes that he lacked the power to emancipate most people. He accomplished his goal of reuniting the North and the South and beginning the process of Reconstruction before his assassination.

Frederick Douglass was a man who ran away from slavery and became one of the leaders of the abolitionist movement. Though Douglass often represented assimilationist ideas, he also contributed notably to the abolition effort and fought for the right of black men to have a voice in the movement. 

Booker T. Washington was a segregationist political speaker, the president of the Tuskegee Institute, and an excellent fundraiser for historically-black colleges and universities. Though Washington, privately, did not agree with many of the policies he publicly upheld, he took a public approach that treated black people as categorically different from whites. This separate and unequal approach drew ire from both assimilationist thinkers and antiracists. 

Marcus Garvey was a racial separatist immigrant from Jamaica who promoted black nationalism and the celebration of Blackness. He separated from the NAACP, which he saw as elitist and colorist, to organize black people around a positive identification with their Blackness. This movement created roots for future black separatist and Black Power organizations.

James Baldwin was an antiracist American author. Speaking up against writers like Richard Wright, Baldwin remained staunchly proactive in decrying racist thought and assimilationist narratives that brought Blackness into the mainstream.