Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

As the title suggests, this chapter introduces Black Power, a mantra coined by Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the SNCC. The term encapsulated the late Malcolm X’s philosophies. In Reynolds’s words, it was a call for “Black people owning and controlling their own neighborhoods and futures, free of White supremacy” (181). This commitment was very different than what racist white people branded the movement as: “Black supremacy” (182). It was another instance in which “the mere notion of antiracist ideas got purposely jumbled into hateful extremism” (182).

Black Power gave rise to Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale’s Black Panther Party for Self Defense. The Party’s “Ten-Point Platform” stressed freedom from prisons and police brutality and equal opportunities for Black Americans in housing, jobs, education, and more. As chapters grew in US cities, the Panthers “policed the police, provided free breakfast for children, and organized medical services and political education programs, among a series of other initiatives” (184), writes Reynolds. Black Power gained influence over even Martin Luther King Jr., who realized elite Black people were the dominant beneficiaries of desegregation, whereas Black Power addressed the needs of all Black people. This new mode of thinking influenced King’s planning for the Poor People’s Campaign and an “economic bill of rights” to ensure employment, income, and housing to all Americans.

In the summer of 1967, Angela Davis moved to San Diego for graduate school, where she started a Black Student Union (BSU), a campus entity that demanded more inclusive and antiracist curriculums.

The next year, white backlash was in full bloom. According to Reynolds, the hit movie Planet of the Apes equated simian monsters with Black people and depicted “the dark world rising against the White conqueror” (186). In a catalyzing and tragic moment for the Black community, a gunman shot and killed Dr. King.

The downfall of Black Power came in its sexism, writes Reynolds. Like so many times before, “women were pushed to the back” (188). In response, Angela Davis joined the Communist Party and worked on the campaign for Charlene Mitchell, the Black woman and the presidential candidate for Communist Party USA who would run against Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon.

In the 1968 election, Nixon led what Reynolds characterizes as a veiled segregationist campaign that strategically “demean[ed] Black people in every speech, while also praising White people” (191) without expressing these views in explicitly racial terms. He stressed a commitment to law and order that, to white people, signified a crackdown on Black protest. Nixon won.

Angela Davis took up a teaching position at UCLA before Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California, had her fired. When she regained her post, Reynolds writes, “[Reagan] fired her for speaking out in defense of three Black inmates in Soledad State Prison who she felt were detained only because they were Black activists” (193). Davis struck up a friendship with the brother of one of the inmates. That brother took a judge, prosecutor, and several jurors hostage in a Marin County courtroom at gunpoint, aiming to free inmates on trial. Police fired and killed the brother, the judge, and two inmates. Angela Davis was charged with murder when the police said one of the guns used had been hers.

Davis fled, but police caught her in New York where they put her in a detention center. She took the opportunity to “develop her Black feminist theory” (195). A few months later, she was transferred to jail and solitary confinement in California. After a year and a half, she defended herself in court and won. Her new goal became freedom for all incarcerated people.

Reynolds lists other influential Black feminists, whose works are of desperate importance amid the continuing silencing of voices from women and the LGBTQ+ community. Audre Lorde, Reynolds writes, “pushed back against the idea that she, as a Black person, woman, and lesbian, was expected to educate White people, men, and/or heterosexuals in order for them to recognize her humanity” (198). Others’ ignorance was not her responsibility.

Ntozake Shange produced the play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, which portrayed the complexity of Black female life.

Alice Walker and Michele Wallace wrote books about Black women facing abuse. All of these works interrogated Black gender dynamics.

Continuing in the Nixonian line of law and order and racism without explicit mentions of race, Ronald Reagan won the presidential election in 1980. As more “antiracist feminist thought” from Davis and others challenged new false narratives concerning America and human nature, Reagan launched the War on Drugs, which was more accurately a war “on Black people” (204), writes Reynolds. The policies disproportionately targeted the types of drugs most prevalent in Black and poor urban settings while they were particularly lenient with the types of drugs most prevalent among wealthy suburban white people. For example, to earn a minimum sentence of five years in prison, a person had to be caught with five grams of crack versus five hundred grams of powder cocaine. Reynolds reminds us that “even though White people and Black people were selling and using drugs at similar rates” (205), the uneven policies and disproportionate police presence in Black neighborhoods led to the mass incarceration of Black people.

Mass incarceration ripped apart families and diminished the Black vote. Other economic policies also increased unemployment. In turn, this turmoil spurred higher rates of violent crime. Reynolds writes, “[A]ccording to Reagan and racists, it was all Black people’s fault” (206). Myths of Black laziness and savagery circulated yet again. Americans compared the wealthy, “perfect Black family” on The Cosby Show to the publicized Black “crack babies” born to drug addicted parents and destined for genetic inferiority, a term coined by a graduate of Harvard’s medical school. Reynolds posits, “There was no science to prove any of this. But who needs science when you have racism?” (207). These old and new iterations of anti-Black racism created “a generation of criminals” (208) in the minds of many Americans.

Here, Reynolds focuses on the efforts and consequences of racists in politics and in the media and the resistance to racism from Black communities. By the late 1980s, Reynolds writes, “Hip-hop had arrived,” and it “was driving change and empowerment” (211). The author lists some influential artists and songs—among them, N.W.A.’s “Straight Outta Compton,” and Queen Latifah’s “Wrath of My Madness”—and puts special emphasis on Public Enemy, whose “Fight the Power” became an anthem “for the new generation of hip-hop heads and rebellious Black teenagers angry about racist mistreatment” (212). He also stresses that women like Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, and Salt-N-Pepa shared in the spotlight as Black feminists continued their intellectual work. These feminists include Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, who articulated the concept of intersectionality between identifying categories like race and gender.

In 1991, Los Angeles police officers beat a young Black man named Rodney King. This was a tipping point for the Black community in the city, a community that “broke open” when they saw the video of the violence captured by a local resident. President Bush appointed a Black justice to the Supreme Court in what Reynolds calls an apparent effort “to pacify an angry and hurt Black community” (213), but Thomas was an assimilationist with an accusation of sexual harassment against him. Anita Hill, the woman who made the accusation, was persecuted while Thomas met no punishment. The tensions in L.A. skyrocketed again the next year when a jury found the police officers that assaulted Rodney King not guilty.

When Bill Clinton won the presidential election in 1992, he “blamed both political parties for failing Black America while also blaming Black America and calling the people in the midst of the uprising—people in immense pain—lawless vandals” (215), writes Reynolds. Clinton and his political allies shut down rappers and amped up law enforcement and incarceration.

Meanwhile, Angela Davis started teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz and left the Communist Party for its failure to address racism, sexism, and elitism. As mass incarceration expanded, she questioned the prison structure and urged a “new abolitionism” (217).

New studies of intelligence held implications in “the unintelligence-Black narrative” (219) that crime laws drove. While some argued that intelligence was relative, complex, and “impossible to actually measure fairly without bias,” others held that standardized testing was legitimate and Black people must be “intellectually inferior due to genetics or environment” (220) if they performed under the caliber of wealthy white students.

The political climate endangered the Black community as both parties revved up their “tough on crime and welfare” (221) statuses. Even as Republicans peddled new ideas about the death of racism and called on everyone to stop talking about it, they tried yet again to have Davis fired from her teaching post. She challenged mainstream racism and the sexism of male-organized Black activism, such as the Million Man March in 1995. Two years later, a million Black women traveled to Philadelphia for their own demonstration.

White society responded by ushering in an age of “color blindness” in which people claimed to not see color and to appreciate multiculturalism. The rhetoric allowed people to bow out of the race conversation and pretend it wasn’t an important factor in determining a person’s treatment in society anymore. According to Reynolds, the denial of racism in favor of color blindness was racist in that it excused prejudice by pretending it didn’t exist, gaslighting people with real experiences of racist maltreatment.

In 2000, scientists declared that there was no biological basis to race: Humans are 99.9% similar in their DNA. Soon after this statement, George W. Bush won the presidency, partially via Black voter suppression in Florida.

Angela Davis and thousands of others attended the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in South Africa, which ended exactly four days before the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Momentum shifted from the antiracism of the conference to heightened xenophobic fear as Bush and others “[promoted] anti-Islamic and anti-Arab sentiments” (230). Even with the explosive performative patriotism that followed the attack, Reynolds writes that “there was no united front” (230) in the US as waning affirmative action and No Child Left Behind policy in education actually diminished support for Black students and teachers.

As Black assimilationists—Reynolds specifically calls out Bill Cosby—continued to blame Black communities for their struggles, a hopeful “star was born” in the political ascent of Barack Obama, who had “both native and immigrant ancestry […] both African and European ancestry […and] checked every box” (232) for a viable Black leader.

As Barack Obama grew in popularity, many Americans regarded him as both the modern iteration of the “extraordinary Negro” and “a symbol of a post-racial America” (236).

The “post-racial make believe” (236) of the moment came crashing down with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a storm that predictably—experts had been warning of the impending crisis for years—flooded and ruined Black communities in Louisiana. Slow federal support and sensationalized stories of Black savagery exemplified the continued patterns of racism at work in the US.

Two years later, Barack Obama led a “crusade of hope and change” (238) when he announced his presidential campaign. Ultimately, Reynolds writes, Obama’s rhetoric “teetered back and forth between painful assimilationist thought and bold antiracism” (239). He won the support of 69.5 million Americans—including Angela Davis—and became the 44th president of the US. His victory represented a victory for Black America and grassroots activism. Reynolds characterizes Obama’s presidency, however, as another example in a long line of assimilationism, despite “flashes—true moments—of antiracist thought” (241).

Bold antiracist action came from Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, three Black women who started the intersectional #BlackLivesMatter movement to expose and combat police brutality against Black people. According to Reynolds, their effort and the ones like it “should be held up as symbols of hope” (243).

The book closes with a short, final direct address to the reader. Reynolds reiterates that race is a social construct and that it has always been used in the shaping and defense of power hierarchies. He insists that racism is “not woven into people as much as it’s woven into policy that people adhere to and believe is truth” (245). He stresses the centrality of racist laws in perpetuating inequality. People believe what they are told in official capacities if they are told it enough times. The media helps reinforce these narratives.

Reynolds lists the figures that he most stressed in the book, ending with “Angela Davis,” who he emphasizes by listing three times. He asks the reader whether they “want to be a segregationist (a hater), an assimilationist (a coward), or an antiracist (someone who truly loves)” (247).