Stamped from the beginning: A history of racist ideas in America

Kendi’s “tour guides”: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, WEB Du Bois and Angela Davis.

Ibram X. Kendi’s monumental Stamped from the Beginning chronicles how racist ideas became established in the fabric of American society. The title comes from Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s 1860 claim that America was founded by white people for white people and the inequality of white and black was “stamped from the beginning.” The book tells the story of racist ideas from the colonial era to the present through five “tour guides”: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois and Angela Davis. Blacks own 2.7 percent of American wealth but make up 40 percent of the jail population. America’s racial disparity is older than the United States but kept alive through constant reinvention by vested interests.

Bostonian Puritan Cotton Mather preached inequality in body skin while insisting the dark souls of enslaved Africans would become white when Christianised. His work was widely publicised during the Enlightenment and justified as a defence of slavery, including by Jefferson, newly independent America’s intellectual giant and third president. After Jefferson’s death Garrison spearheaded an emancipation push based on the racist idea that slavery had brutalised black people, making them inferior. Du Bois, America’s first professionally trained black scholar, believed Garrison but later converted to anti-racism. Davis was another black intellectual who suffered in the backlash to 1960s civil rights advances. Kendi says the popular idea of ignorant people producing racist ideas and then racial discrimination is false. He says racial discrimination leads to racist ideas which lead to ignorance and hate. Consumers of racist ideas believe that something is wrong with black people and not the policies that have enslaved, oppressed and confined them.

Cotton Mather’s grandfathers John Cotton and Richard Mather brought Puritan racist ideas to America. Richard Mather was instrumental in the founding of Harvard, leaning on Aristotle’s theory that hotter climates produced inferior people. Using Aristotle and St Paul’s defence of slavery (“obey your earthly masters”), John Cotton produced New England’s first constitution in 1636 legalising “perpertuall servants.” When Cotton died, Mather married his widow while Mather’s son married his daughter and named their son Cotton Mather after the alliance. Young Mather was marked out for greatness following his father and grandfathers into the ministry, entering Harvard aged 11. He followed his father as Boston’s foremost Puritan pastor. Mather believed in witchcraft and supported the Salem trials and executions in 1692. He absorbed the idea of graded “races” with Europeans at the top. Mather supported slavery but believed black souls could be saved, which was not popular, because Christian slaves could sue for their freedom. His 1706 book on slavery The Negro Christianised influenced young Benjamin Franklin. As slavery increased in the 18th century so did slave revolts and severe anti-black codes, stripping free blacks from owning property. Gradually Mather’s ideas that blacks could be Christianised took hold, which one slaveholder said encouraged them to “become more humble and better servants”. Mather died in 1728 aged 65. As Kendi said he had produced the racist idea of “simultaneously subduing and uplifting” slaves. As Mather’s son and biographer put it, Mather had blessed blacks with the prayer “Lord Wash that poor Soul (and) make him white.”

Cotton Mather’s greatest disciple was Thomas Jefferson who grew up amid slave workers at wealthy Shadwell estate. He studied at Virginia’s College of William and Mary and graduated in law, following his father into the House of Burgesses. Though against slavery he used slave labour to build a plantation at Monticello, near Charlottesville. Jefferson joined the rebel Virginian legislature in 1774 protesting British debts, taxes and mandates to trade within the empire. In 1776 Jefferson attended the Second Continental Congress and drafted the independence document with its immortal line “All men are created equal”. It was unclear if Jefferson’s “all” included black people and he criminalised runaways in the Declaration of Independence. Samuel Johnson pointed out American hypocrisies saying the “loudest yelps for liberty (come from) the drivers of negroes”. But America gained a powerful ally in Adam Smith and his 1776 bestseller The Wealth of Nations which said wealth stemmed from productive capacity which Africa lacked. While Britain tried to crush the American revolt, Jefferson hid in Monticello and wrote Notes on Virginia (1781). Jefferson wanted to end slavery and acknowledged white prejucide but also said blacks were intellectually inferior. In 1784 he took up a diplomatic appointment to Paris while his slaves made Monticello profitable. He missed the Convention which omitted slavery from the new US Constitution but introduced the infamous “three fifths rule” which counted three-fifths of enslaved blacks (“other persons”) in the census, handing power to the South until the civil war. In France Jefferson also began a lifelong affair with his slave Sally Hemings with whom he had at least five children.

He returned to America in 1790 to become George Washington’s first Secretary of State. He fought against Haiti’s slave revolt fearing it might inspire American copycats, calling its leaders “cannibals of the terrible republic.” Around this time, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin which put cotton and slavery at the centre of the American economy. Jefferson became president in 1800 and his Louisiana Purchase in 1803 doubled the size of America as slaveholders marched west into new lands. While Jefferson promoted the end of the international slave trade in 1808, it increased the demand for American slaves. Slavery helped the north’s factories and ports and powered America’s Industrial Revolution, sucking the life out of anti-racist movements. Jefferson retired in 1809, though all the presidents until 1841 except Quincy Adams were his disciples. The 1820 Compromise admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state which Jefferson worried would eventually lead to civil war.

In retirement Jefferson refused to condemn slavery though one enduring legacy was his promotion of the idea of colonisation. He suggested slaves guilty of plotting rebellion could be sent to the Caribbean or Africa. The idea was later taken up by the American Colonisation Society and Kentucky Whig Henry Clay who influenced Lincoln. The US colonised part of west Africa which they called Liberia, though few black Northerners would go there. In 1829 the ACS invited young Bostonian William Lloyd Garrison to give an address. Garrison hated slavery under the influence of Ohio Quaker journalist Benjamin Lundy and shocked the ACS by demanding emancipation not colonisation. In 1831 Garrison started abolitionist newspaper the Liberator and a year later wrote Thoughts on African Colonisation which condemned “the expulsion of the blacks.” Garrison’s ideas including the need for a cheap black workforce was the deathknell of the ACS.

Garrison inspired a printing revolution spread by railroads with abolitionist ideas printed on cheap rag paper determined to “awaken the consciousness of the nation to the evils of slavery”. Though 300,000 people joined Garrison’s movement by 1840, enraged slavers saw his tracts as an act of war. Congress led by South Carolina senator John Calhoun banned the post office from sharing them. In 1845 Frederick Douglass wrote his narrative of his escape from slavery, with Garrison writing a preface. By the end of the decade Free Soilers demanded slavery restrictions. In the Compromise of 1850 California was admitted as a free state, ending the balance between free and slave states but the Fugitive Slave Act was strengthened to criminalise abettors and deny Blacks a jury trial. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin strengthened the link between black slaves and Christianity but she wanted a return to colonisation, which president Fillmore endorsed. While Garrison and Douglass criticised Stowe’s racist ideas, her writings brought more abolitionist support than either of them.

In 1854 Democrat Senator Stephen Douglas pushed the Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress, repealing the Missouri Compromise and leaving the slavery question for settlers to settle. The bill destroyed the Whigs and the Republicans contested the 1856 election against the spread of slavery. The 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision declared blacks were inferior and could not be citizens. Douglas fought the 1858 Senate election in defence of Scott while ex-Whig and now Republican Abraham Lincoln declared a vote for Douglas was a vote to expand slavery. Lincoln believed that slavery retarded non-slaveholding white southerners. Garrison hated most politicians but recognised anti-slavery votes could make a Republican president in 1860. Southern fears increased after John Brown’s failed raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. After Brown was hanged he became a martyr to the anti-slavery cause. The Democrats split over Kansas handing the election to Lincoln. Secession spread across the deep south and Jefferson Davis became president of the Confederacy. His vice president Alexander Stephens said their government “rested upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man”. Three weeks later, the Confederates bombed Fort Sumter. Lincoln said the civil war was fought to protect the union but Garrison knew it was a war to end slavery. Thousands of blacks fled north and the Union Army was forbidden to send them back. The Fugitive Slave Act was dead. Lincoln still believed in colonization and wanted blacks to move to Liberia. Douglass dismissed it as hypocrisy and as war progressed, colonisation talk died. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Declaration on January 1, 1863 and wrote himself into history as the Great Emancipator. At a celebratory concert in Boston that day, the hero was not Lincoln. “Three cheers for GARRISON,” they shouted.

As war ended, thoughts turned to reconstruction including black civil and voting rights. While Sherman gave 40-acre land plots to blacks in South Carolina, other whites pushed back. New Freedman’s Bureau boss Oliver Howard believed blacks would remain dependent on their masters and refused to spend money on a “pauperising agency”. After Lincoln’s death, president Johnson restored Southern property rights. Emboldened Confederates barred black voting and instituted discriminatory codes which they justified because blacks were “naturally lazy, lawless and oversexed.” Former Rebel general and grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan Nathan Bedford Forrest said violence was necessary to “keep the niggers in their place.” Republican Rutherford Hayes won the disputed election of 1876 by promising to stop interfering in the South. In 1879 Garrison called it an abomination and “bloody misrule” before dying four weeks later. In 1883 the Supreme Court overturned the 1875 civil rights act, the last gasp of reconstruction. The era of intimidation began with Jim Crow laws. Between 1889 and 1929 a southern black was lynched every four days.

As W.E.B. Du Bois said, “the slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back towards slavery.” “Willie” Du Bois was born in small town Massachusetts in 1868 and raised by his abandoned mother. Suffering racism at school he was determined to show the world “Negroes were like other people”. This was a time of Social Darwinism when Darwin’s ideas were used to show blacks were too weak to thrive in the modern world. The talented young Du Bois was not immediately permitted to attend Harvard but went to America’s top black college Fisk University in Nashville where he learned about assimilation and uplift suasion, the racist idea that blacks must change white minds about their abilities. “When you have the right sort of black voters, you will need no election laws,” he said on hearing of voter suppression laws. After graduating he achieved his dream and attended Harvard’s history doctoral program. He gained a scholarship to attend the University of Berlin in 1892. He studied two years in Berlin until funding ran out and he was not allowed to defend his economics doctoral thesis. Though he earned his history doctorate at Harvard in 1895, racist whites such as Franklin Roosevelt called him one of “a half dozen Negroes”which Harvard had made “a man out of a semi beast.”

Du Bois taught Greek and Latin at the African Methodist Episcopal flagship college in Wilberforce, Ohio. He believed white stupidity was the cause of racism and was determined to spread knowledge based on scientific investigation. Black intellectual Booker T. Washington was more acceptable to white minds as he wanted blacks to remain at the bottom in comfort, to “dignify and glorify common labour”. President Grover Cleveland hailed Washington the “new hope”. In 1896 the Supreme Court supported Washington’s segregationist ideas with the “separate but equal” doctrine in Plessy v Ferguson stating Jim Crow laws did not violate the constitution. Whites ignored discrimination, preferring to focus on what was wrong with blacks.

In 1896 Frederick Hoffman released an influential theory that American blacks were headed towards extinction due to their immorality, law-breaking and diseases. Du Bois noted Hoffman’s native Germany had higher death rates than American blacks but no one was saying Germans were going extinct. But he had no answer to high black crime rates, which perpetuated the circle of more police, more arrests and more suspicions. He accepted Hoffman’s numbers as fact and believed it was a black problem to solve, pushing education and persuasion, reproducing the racist ideas he was trying to eliminate.

Booker Washington was at the height of his power in 1901 with his autobiography Up From Slavery which promoted personal responsibility, hard work, and “white saviours”. Du Bois scolded him for his accommodation though even that was too much for some racists. When president Theodore Roosevelt invited Washington to dinner, South Carolina senator Ben Tillman said it would “necessitate our killing of a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again”. Roosevelt never invited a black person to the White House again. In 1903 Du Bois released his own book The Souls of Black Folk comparing humble, soulful Africans with hard, rational Europeans. Du Bois argued blacks were not allowed self-consciousness but could only view themselves through white eyes. He wanted them to see themselves as “both a Negro and an American.” Du Bois criticised Washington’s “Talented Tenth”, the top 10 percent of Black Americans which he said added to the prejudice. A white Nashville paper admitted Du Bois’s call to strike down Jim Crow made the book “dangerous to read”.

President Theodore Roosevelt believed lynching was the fault of black rapists while he dishonourable discharged a famous black regiment falsely accused of murder in the racist Texas town Brownsville. When Jack Johnston became the first black world boxing champion, newspapers fixated on his white wife. He became the most hated black man in America. His victory over white boxer Jim Jeffries sent racist mobs into frenzy. The US government succeeded where his opponents failed and arrested Johnston on trumped-up charges of transporting a prostitute across state lines. He fled bail and lived overseas for seven years before spending a year in jail.

Du Bois helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1910 as Social Darwinism was at its height and published the NAACP newspaper the Crisis promoting black ability including the first black millionaires. He encouraged blacks to vote for Woodrow Wilson for president but once in office Wilson supported southern segregationists. Wilson held a White House screening of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of the Nation which depicted post civil war blacks as evil rapists of white women. The film revitalised the Klan and prompted an increase in lynching which led to a great migration of blacks north during the First World War. Racist Harlemites feared a menace of “black hordes” and began a white flight that led to segregated communities across America. Du Bois attended the Paris Peace Conference and wrote how the victors opposed granting independence to African countries though black soldiers were well received in Europe. President Wilson worried the good treatment of blacks would “go to their heads”.

Du Bois’s post-war essays Darkwater argued the belief that blacks were sub-human had no factual basis. White reviewers slammed it as a “hymn of racial hate”. Flamboyant Jamaican Marcus Garvey led a new African solidarity movement. Du Bois admitted Garvey was extraordinary, but opposed Garvey’s introduction of Caribbean colour politics into America. When racist president Warren Harding opposed racial amalgamation in the south, Garvey hailed his support of racial separatism while Du Bois was appalled. Garvey was silenced by mail fraud and was eventually deported.

During the Depression, Du Bois realised that trying to persuade powerful racists was impossible and became an ardent antiracist socialist. FDR’s New Deal was racially discriminatory to secure Congress approval of Southern Democrats but was attractive enough to take black votes from the Republicans. By 1934 Du Bois supported Garveyite segregationist positions of black institutions and saw comparisons with the Jews in Hitler’s Germany. When America joined the Second World War, Du Bois backed the black American “double V” campaign against racism at home and fascism abroad. At war’s end he attended the United Nations conference in San Francisco and was feted by black African leaders determined to forge independence with American help. But the situation remained dire in the south. Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo called on “every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the niggers away from the polls.” Six thousand years had proved black inferiority, Bilbo raged.

Scientists had other ideas and proved that skin colour had no effect on intelligence. The Truman administration promised to move towards black civil rights, worried about America’s international reputation. However the McCarthyite witchhunt equated black activism with Communism and the 82-year-old Du Bois was arrested in 1951 before being exonerated. His passport was revoked to stop him from making embarrassing revelations overseas. The Supreme Court finally overturned the odious “separate but equal” segregation in 1953’s Brown v Board of Education, Du Bois saying, “I have seen the impossible happen.” Southern white politicians railed against the decision saying it promoted “hatred and suspicion” where none existed before. It led to the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott with its young figurehead Martin Luther King, whom Du Bois called an American Gandhi. A year later Arkansas deployed the national guard to stop school desegregation forcing Eisenhower to send in federal troops. Now approaching 90 and with his passport returned, Du Bois toured the Communist world. He told Mao that American blacks were not diseased, but merely lacking income. Du Bois was still alive to read King’s letter from Birmingham Jail which said “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Du Bois died aged 95 on August 27, 1963 one day before King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington. The NAACP’s Roy Wilkins told the Washington meeting that Du Bois was “the voice calling you to gather here today.”

Angela Davis also experienced racism growing up, born in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama. Educated by radical parents she studied at Massachusetts’ Brandeis University where she was electrified by lectures from author James Baldwin and activist Malcolm X. X argued that whites weren’t born racist but the American “political, economic and social atmosphere…automatically nourishes a racist psychology”. The Civil Rights Act 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 brought enfranchisement but also a change in racist tactics. Media warned of “a time bomb ticking in the ghettoes” and black riots in depressed neighbourhoods were an excuse for police crackdowns. Like Du Bois, Davis did post grad studies in Germany but returned to California intoxicated by new black movements. She joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee dedicated to nonviolent, direct action while completing her doctorate at UC San Diego. After King was assassinated, she joined a massive rally in Los Angeles where she blamed racism for the killing but she urged against confrontation with the well-equipped LAPD which recruited many officers from the deep south.

In that year Richard Nixon studied the racist tactics of Alabama governor George Wallace. Nixon’s law-and-order “southern strategy” of demeaning blacks without mentioning race helped win the presidential election. Emboldened Republican governor of California Ronald Reagan tried to fire Davis from her teaching position at UC though the state’s Superior Court ruled his anti-Communist regulation was unconstitutional. She was sacked again in 1970 after attending a rally to free two Jackson brothers who were sentenced to life due to black power activism in jail. That August another of the Jackson brothers took a judge hostage at gunpoint before police opened fire killing him and the judge. Ownership of one of Jackson’s guns was traced to Davis and she was charged with murder, kidnapping and conspiracy, facing a death sentence if found guilty. She went on the run. J. Edgar Hoover placed her photo complete with famous Afro on the FBI’s top ten most wanted list. She was arrested in New York in October and extradited for trial in California. Amid calls of “Free Angela” the prosecution alleged her gun ownership, flight, and words of love for Jackson in her diary constituted first degree murder. The jury did not agree and acquitted her in June 1972.

Davis put her energies into black incarceration saying jail only created crime. Her old enemy Ronald Reagan had other ideas. In the 1980 election campaign, Reagan emulated Nixon by not mentioning blacks but his promise to restore state rights helped win southern white votes and with them, the presidency. He cut social programs, the New York Times noting that much progress against poverty made in the 1960s and 70s had been “wiped out”. In 1982 Reagan issued a devastating law enforcement executive order to “mobilise all our forces to stop the flow of drugs into this country” despite few Americans viewing drug usage as a major problem. Davis ran as vice president for the US Communist Party in 1980 and again in 1984 where she condemned Reagan as the most racist and sexist president in history.

Reagan’s War on Drugs targetted drugs used by blacks such as marijuana and crack cocaine aided by racist stories in the media while the mostly white users of cocaine were ignored. Although blacks and whites used drugs in equal numbers, blacks were twice as likely as whites to face prison for usage, especially in heavy-policed inner cities, feeding the stereotype of dangerous black neighbourhoods. The prison population quadrupled between 1980 and 2000 due entirely to stiffer sentencing policies. Reagan was less willing to fund a war on unemployment which might have reduced violent crime. Millions of blacks were hauled into the justice system where they could not vote, affecting countless close elections in the years to come, including the 2000 presidential election. Drunk drivers, three-quarters of which were white, killed more people than urban blacks, yet were not demonised as violent criminals nor was there a war on drunk driving.

George H.W. Bush tapped into the anti-black formula to win the 1988 election. He was losing in the polls until he released an ad complaining that black murderer Willie Horton had raped white women while on bail. Bush supported the 1987 Supreme Court judgement McCluskey v Kemp which ruled that the racially disproportionate impact of Georgia’s death penalty did not justify overturning a death sentence. One academic called it “the Dred Scott decision of our time”. Davis agreed, complaining blacks were suffering the most oppression since slavery. President Bush condemned the Rodney King video in 1991 but did not retreat from his tough-on-crime stance. Bill Clinton beat him in 1992 by promising more of the same. Davis was a rare voice denouncing the law and order argument which was leading to more police and more prisons.

The Republicans moved further right with the racist mandate of blacks needing to take “personal responsibility” for their socioeconomic plight and racial disparities, dusting off theories of lazy and dependent blacks. Clinton supported the idea ahead of the 1996 election with a bill limiting welfare programs. Republicans were outraged when UC honoured Davis with a prestigious professorship in 1995 decrying her reputation for “racism, violence and communism.” A year later California banned affirmative action and the percentage of African Americans at UC went into decline.

By 2000 Davis lamented that there were two million prisoners in America, half of them black. She imagined a world without incarceration in her book Are Prisons Obsolete? which noted criminals were fantasised as people of colour. Though the idea of race was exposed as factually incorrect and Clinton said people were “99.9 percent the same”, people focused on the supposed 0.1 percent difference. George W. Bush won the 2000 election when his brother Jeb denied tens of thousands of black legitimate votes in Florida. Bush promoted the racist standardised testing tying education funding to test scores, blaming victims for being left behind, and took voter suppression methods to Ohio to retain power in 2004. The racism of Bush’s America was exposed by the double tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, first the black lives lost unnecessarily and then the prime real estate cleared away for gentrification.

Barack Obama emerged as the electrifying keynote speaker in the 2004 Democratic convention and cemented his reputation with his memoir Dreams From My Father. Following Du Bois, Obama noted that only white culture could be deemed objective and non-racial. Obama’s 2008 opponent Joe Biden fed the stereotype by calling him “the first mainstream African American who is bright and clean” while Michelle Obama was depicted as an “angry black women” for saying her people were hungry for change. When reporters found no dirt on the Obamas they condemned his support for Pastor Jeremiah Wright for attacking the American prison system and preaching American terrorism abroad led to 9/11. Obama saved his campaign by abandoning Wright’s “distorted view” and pacified racists by blaming blacks’ “own complicity” in their problems. Still, the 64-year-old Davis gave her first ever vote to the Democrats in that election, enraptured by the pride of a black victory.

Hatred against blacks did not disappear with Obama’s victory. Despite claims America was “post racial”, there was a rise in police shootings of black people and murders of black people leading to Dylann Roof’s shooting dead nine Charlestonians in southern America’s oldest AME church in 2015. Kendi’s book came out a year later. The issues remain the same as that confronted Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, WEB Du Bois and Angela Davis. The Black Lives Matters movement rejected the racism of six centuries but right wing pundits blamed blacks for the rise in violent racism. In the age of Trump, Republican administrations passed electoral laws to disenfranchise Black voters, and banned teaching the history of how southern states maintained white power through systems of racial disenfranchisement. Lawmakers won’t change racist policies for fear of discriminating against whites. But supporting prevailing bigotries is only in the interest of a tiny group of ultra rich WASP males. The rest of us need to do the intelligent thing for ourselves, Kendi says.