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

Segregationism, assimilationism, and antiracism are the three modes of thinking about race in America that Kendi traces across his text. Segregationists, Kendi writes, are a group that “has blamed Black people themselves for […] racial disparities” (2). Antiracists have blamed “racial discrimination” for those disparities (2). Assimilationists have “tried to argue for both, saying that Black people and racial discrimination were to blame for racial disparities” (2). All three of these groups have existed, Kendi shows, since before America began, all three inhabited the foundation of the country, and all three persist today.

Since public, overt discrimination was outlawed in the middle of the 20th century, some may feel that segregationist thought does not exist anymore in America, at least not in the mainstream. Kendi resists this idea. By the previous definition of segregationism, those who believe in uplift suasion (for example, Du Bois at the beginning of his career, or Bill Cosby, more recently) would be segregationists. Similarly, those who, like Dinish D’Souza did in 1995, ask black people to stop pointing to discrimination as a reason for racial disparities, would count as segregationists.

Assimilationists appear throughout history. At different points, Kendi calls each of the individuals after whom he names chapters (with the exception of Davis) assimilationist; even Barack Obama, he notes, has publicly espoused many assimilationist ideas. Assimilationism is a kind of racist thought that has also divided the black community from the days of enslavement to the present: Kendi is clear that black people can be racist against themselves, too. Colorism—of which Marcus Garvey accused Du Bois and the NAACP at the beginning of the 20th century, embodied assimilationism among black people—showed the preference for Whiteness.

Finally, antiracist thought—of which examples can be difficult to find early in American history—is the undergirding inspiration for Kendi’s text. Kendi feels strongly that “any effective solution to eradicating American racism must involve Americans committed to antiracist policies” that will lead to mainstream, antiracist justifications for that policy (510). Du Bois’s shift from primarily assimilationist thought perhaps best embodies the acceleration of antiracism in the 20th century. 

Black developments in the arts have provided a starting point for antiracist, assimilationist, and segregationist thought across American history. From Phyllis Wheatley, who in 1772 was put to trial over her authorship of a set of poems that “[attacked] segregationist curse theory,” to Spike Lee, Kendi tracks black artists’ work as it channels and inspires both racist and antiracist thought (93). Part of the “Black exhibit” culture that arose from Phyllis Wheatley persists in the present day: the instinct to comment upon, generalize, scientifically explain, and judge black people based on artistic products and merit remains a part of American society.

Music and literature have been and remain a means for black communities and individuals to speak about issues that affect them. NWA’s “Fuck Tha Police” became an anthem in the late 1980s; much earlier, in the 1920s, blues music and the writings of the “Niggerati” of the Harlem Renaissance helped to individualize and diversify the black experience in an age of uplift suasion and the Talented Tenth. Kendi notes that black arts communities have often split over differences having to do with assimilationism and antiracism. Associations of particular works with particular civil rights groups cemented these divides.

Female authors and musicians are both common producers of art and commonly disempowered. From Wheatley to Zora Neale Hurston, these female artists systematically met complex and discriminatory reception not only from white audiences but also from black male audiences. Sexism within antiracist movements exacerbated the loss of critical female voices, like Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s, in both the literary world and the media. In the 1990s, with the rise of black male filmmakers, Kendi notes a significant dearth of female roles for actresses and directors. At the same time, the use of media to build campaigns like #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName began with women.

Kendi tracks the theme of enslavement to pre-American times, noting that slavery existed in Africa and around the world and, before Zurara’s text, was not specifically tied to skin color. Through the work of Zurara and others, the rise of the concept of race was explicitly tied to the idea of enslavement, justifications for which caused the creation and proliferation of the term.

Davis, in her anti-prison initiatives, called for “a new abolitionism” that would address the “social problems that lead to imprisonment” (454). Preventing the cycle of repression in prisons—which disenfranchises imprisoned people, preventing them from voting and pulling them out of their communities—is of paramount importance to antiracist activists. Though many thinkers take issue with Davis’s conflation of slavery and imprisonment, the racial and discriminatory justifications for disproportionate imprisonment of blacks have their origins in slavery, according to Kendi. The two phenomena, therefore, are linked throughout history and not dissimilar.