Stamped from the Beginning summary

When it comes to racism in America, progress has invariably sparked a racist backlash. The Donald Trump administration, which followed that of former president Barack Obama’s, is the latest prominent example of this. And the racist ideas of each era didn’t just pop out of nowhere – they were produced and reproduced by some of the most influential minds in American public life.

By examining the life and work of five historical figures – Puritan Minister Cotton Mather, President Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Garrison, scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, and activist Angela Davis – these blinks chart a comprehensive history of racist ideas in America. This exhaustive analysis will show you how to identify racist ideas of all kinds – and how we can best fight them.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

• how Europeans invented the fantasy of race;
• why even pro-Black activists often echoed racist ideas; and
• which strategy has proven most effective in fighting racism.

A racist idea is any idea that paints one racial group as inferior to another – no matter if for supposed genetic, environmental, or social reasons.Why do people produce such ideas at all, though?

A common conclusion is that it’s ignorance and hate that inform the production of racist ideas. And because of this, white people then elect leaders that devise racist policies, which result in racial discrimination. 

But history actually suggests the inverse causal relationship. America’s thought leaders frequently produced racist ideas only after the fact, as a means of justifying the racist policies and resulting discrimination of their time. Their ideas were then consumed by the wider population, sparking race-based animosity.

The key message here is: Europeans invented racism out of colonial self-interest.

So why would America’s political and intellectual leaders devise racist policies, and then spread racist ideas to rationalize them? It’s because they believed this to be in their best political, economic, and cultural interests. In fact, this is how the fantasy of race originated.

Of course, prejudice against outside groups has existed since the beginning of time. But the notion of distinct human races such as “white” and “Black” emerged only when Europeans started colonizing Africa.

When Slavic communities started resisting Western European slave raiders in the mid-1400s, Europeans had to turn elsewhere to keep their bustling slave trade afloat. Portugal became the first nation to ship back enslaved people from the West African coast, and thus pioneered the new genre of anti-Black racist ideas. Portugal’s thought leaders birthed the argument that Africans were in need of civil and religious salvation – in the form of slavery. 

When Columbus touched down in America in 1492, these racist ideas, which referenced barbarism, animalistic instincts, and hypersexuality, were readily transferred to Native Americans.

In the meantime, European scholars began debating the causes of their invented concept of Black “savagery.” Curse theorists believed that Blackness was a biblical curse; while climate theorists essentially argued that perceived Black “inferiority” was caused by the weather. Ultimately, both factions agreed that there was something fundamentally different about the Black people they exploited.

In 1606, this alleged difference got an official name, when a French diplomat first included the word “race” in the dictionary. Defining it as meaning “descent,” he explained that a man, horse, or dog could be“from a good or bad race.”

By the time English Protestants started settling in America, the myth of the non-European barbarian was nearly two centuries old. So when Puritans wrote New England’s first constitution in 1636, they could draw on a rich roster of racist ideas to justify enslaving people in their colonies.

In the beginning, not all of these enslaved people were Black. However, wealthy slave owners quickly realized that the best way to prevent joint revolts of poor white servants, Native American captives, and enslaved Africans was a divide-and-conquer strategy. And so they began relying more and more on Black labor, and invented new privileges to pacify white servants.

In addition, by the end of the seventeenth century, most colonies had outlawed interracial relationships and installed white slave patrols to police Black people.In these ways, wealthy Puritans divided the lowest class of their new society along racial lines.

Here’s the key message: America’s first outspoken assimilationist, Cotton Mather, preached that Black people could attain white souls.

Puritans framed their exploitative economic system as part of their mission to Christianize the world. They disagreed among themselves whether enslaved Black people actually had the capacity for Christianity.

Puritan minister Cotton Mather was convinced that they did. Publishing more books than any other American at the time, Mather emerged as New England’s preeminent voice on race and religion in the early eighteenth century. He believed that Black people were, in his words, better off being “fed and clothed” than living in freedom. But he also urged wealthy Puritans to baptize them. If Black people were converted to Christianity, he preached, they could become “white” in their souls. 

Mather’s obsession with whiteness was inspired by the work of the British Royal Society, who’d just started constructing a “scientific” ranking system of human races. Naturally, the white race came out on top of this made-up hierarchy, and European scientists declared it the “yardstick against which the other [race]s are measured.” Effectively, in the new world, thought-leaders like Mather helped connect whiteness to notions of beauty, light, and reason.

Because he believed that Black people could achieve such whiteness – at least spiritually – Mather could be called America’s first well-known assimilationist. Though he frequently emphasized Black people’s humanity, he still believed that humanity to be inferior to that of white people.At the same time, however, a few other religious leaders started using biblical arguments to pioneer abolitionist and anti-racist ideas. In 1688, for example, a first Petition Against Slavery circulated in the Quaker community of Germantown. By the mid-eighteenth century, this rising awareness led to America’s first Great Awakening.

Thomas Jefferson, who would go on to become president, was born in 1743 at the height of a new intellectual era: the Enlightenment. Its influence on his decisions when it came to the treatment of Black people in America is noticeable.

European Enlightenment thinkers expanded on the racist discourse engendered by colonialism. They held lively debates about monogenesis versus polygenesis, and found ever new ways of exalting whiteness and demonizing Blackness. Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus, for example, came up with a complete hierarchy of the animal kingdom that placed the white “Homo sapiens europaeus” at the top.

Interestingly, most racist European Enlightenment thinkers were strongly opposed to slavery. They could afford to, though – they had no direct economic stake in American slavery.

The key message? Thomas Jefferson embodied the hypocritical antislavery stance of his time.

Young Jefferson consumed the racist abolitionist ideas of the Enlightenment while being raised by enslaved Black people on his father’s plantation. So, when he began his political career, it didn’t strike him as a contradiction to endorse the new anti-English, antislavery sentiment that was spreading through the colonies.

In fact, the Boston Tea Party that kick-started the fight for American independence in 1773 couldn’t have come at a more opportune time for Jefferson. He was just building his own plantation and drowning in debt from British taxes. And so he had no problem arguing that the English were unjustly enslaving Americans.

Such hypocrisy was typical of him. In his draft of the Declaration of Independence, for example, slaveholding Jefferson wrote that “all Men are created equal” and freedom was an “inalienable right.” 

When America finally gained its independence from Britain on July 4, 1776, the abolitionist movement did indeed briefly gather steam. The number of freed Black people in the North proliferated. 

Unfortunately, so did a new racist idea, which the author labels: uplift suasion. This is the term given to the assimilationist idea that if Black people simply “behave well enough,” white people would be persuaded away from the racist system of slavery. 

But with the introduction of waterpower and the purchase of Louisiana in 1803, American cotton production went through the roof. “King Cotton” demanded ever more slavery – and with it more racist stratagems and notions. As the number of enslaved Africans rapidly increased, abolitionist and assimilationist ideas faded into the background. Slavery became a massive business for Southern plantation owners and Northern investors.

And so toward the end of his life, a self-righteous Jefferson wrote that “on the subject of emancipation I have ceased to think because [it is] not to be the work of my day.”

By the time Thomas Jefferson died in 1826, the number of enslaved Black people had doubled to over one million. The newly-founded American Colonization Society was now advocating for the continued colonization of Africa to meet slave labor demands whilst also advising that freed Black people should simply be shipped back to Africa. 

But in 1820s Boston, a reinvigorated abolitionist movement was beginning to find its voice. Young William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of the abolitionist newspaper the Genius of Universal Emancipation, forcefully noted in it that “no valid excuse can be given for the continuance of the evil a single hour.”

Before long, he founded his own paper, the Liberator, urgently advocating for the abolition of slavery and progressive action toward granting equality to Black people.

The key message here is: Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison couldn’t help but buy into assimilationist myths.

For white Americans, the Liberator quickly became the primary voice of the new abolitionist movement. Garrison ignited fellow abolitionists to start organizing against the American Colonization Society (ACS), founding the oppositional American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. By the end of the year, the AASS had circulated over one million pamphlets decrying the evil of slavery and calling for immediate emancipation.

For all his progressive, anti-racist opposition to slavery though, Garrison was still a product of his time. He couldn’t resist reproducing ultimately dangerous racist ideas to further his cause. For example, he bought into the myth of uplift suasion, urging freed Black people to assimilate to white cultural practices in order to end racism. In addition, his pamphlets often painted Black people as innately docile, religious people. This emerging racist stereotype was later picked up by novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which depicted Black people as inferior in intellect, but superior in “soul.”

Of course, the segregationists of the ACS wouldn’t go down without a fight. They established their own pro-slavery, racist Southern newspaper, De Bow’s Review, to oppose the new progressive movement, and cheerily give slaveholding tips to Southern white people.

By 1850 though, President Zachary Taylor was under mounting pressure from abolitionist Northerners. Consequently, he agreed to close the Washington DC slave market, and admit California to the Union as a free state. This shifted the balance of power in favor of Northern abolitionists, which enraged Southern segregationists. When the Union threatened to put a permanent end to slavery in the Southern states, they retaliated by calling for secession from the Union.

In December 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union. Other states in the region followed shortly after, thereby forming the Southern Confederacy. 

Just weeks after Abraham Lincoln became president in 1861, Southern Confederate and Northern Union states became embroiled in a full-on civil war. Even though Lincoln had opposed Black voting rights earlier in his career, he now positioned himself as a firm abolitionist. In a shrewd strategic move, Lincoln declared that all who managed to flee to Union or Union-occupied territory would be free from enslavement. In 1863, he doubled down with his famous Emancipation Proclamation, officially freeing all enslaved people under Union control.

However, Lincoln didn’t enforce these measures out of anti-racist goodwill. He simply believed they were a necessary measure to save the Union. It was, after all, only after it became clear that the idea of sending freed Black people back to Africa was untenable, that Lincoln embraced his role as history’s “Great Emancipator.”

The key message? As soon as the institution of slavery was abolished, white Southerners reconstructed this same oppressive model.

By the time the Confederates surrendered in 1865, 400,000 Black Southerners had managed to escape into the Union. Of that number, 40,000 were granted land and mules to start their new lives in freedom. Soon after, the Thirteenth Amendment formally abolished slavery, and Black people all over the South were asserting their young liberties and founding schools, colleges, social clubs, and political associations.

These changes came with vicious, racist backlash, though. In efforts to regain economic, cultural, and political control over their states, white people in the South went to work reconstructing an updated form of slavery, and revived violent ideas to rationalize the continued discrimination. For example, so-called Black Codes forced Black Americans into oppressive labor contracts and drastically restricted their movement, while Jim Crow laws began cementing the South’s new system of Black-and-white segregation.

In addition, Black voting rights had fatefully been excluded from the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and Democratic politicians like future president Andrew Johnson lobbied to keep it that way. Politicians like Johnson pioneered the new racist myth of reverse discrimination, which made the case that if Black people gained full voting rights, they’d soon come to dominate American culture and politics completely, at the expense of white interests.

In response, white Southerners resisted the imagined threat of “Black dominion” by enforcing white supremacy with even greater violence, including under the direction of racist associations like the Ku Klux Klan.

Civil Rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois made it his life’s work to oppose the racist machinations and violence of the Reconstruction Era. He grew up in a small, liberal town in Massachusetts, and later built on the perspectives developed at home when he traveled to study in Nashville, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Berlin, Germany. 

He returned to the US in 1894, at the height of the Progressive Era, where disenfranchised Americans from the Women’s Suffrage movement to workers unions, were discovering the power of social activism.

Unfortunately, many of these white activists were primarily concerned with the plight of white people, which necessitated strong action from Black folk like Du Bois to push racism to the center of the social justice debate. In 1909, for example, he co-founded the influential National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) who would directly address the intersection of racial discrimmination and social justice. 

But even Du Bois couldn’t help reproducing some of the racist ideas of his time.

The key message is: It took the effects of the Great Depression for W.E.B. Du Bois to shed his assimilationist beliefs.

Pushback against the progressive momentum around the turn of the century was supported by a new round of racist “scientific” theories. First, biologists twisted Darwin’s theory of evolution to argue that the white race was the most advanced of all. Then, Italian Cesare Lombroso invented the discipline of criminology, in which he claimed that all non-white men were born criminals, a hypothesis that laid the groundwork for America’s racist criminal justice system. Next, eugenicists argued that human populations could be improved by excluding biologically “inferior” groups from their gene pool. 

In combating these latest racist ideas, W.E.B. Du Bois sometimes veered into problematic territory himself, like over-emphasizing qualities in Black people that racists played down. For example, in objecting to the image of the negligent Black “antimother,” Du Bois painted Black women as innately gregarious supermothers.

But in 1929, the Great Depression hit America, which impacted his outlook. Observing the havoc the economic crisis wreaked on Black communities, Du Bois started to challenge his more assimilationist ideas. Suddenly, it seemed absurd to urge Black people to “lift” themselves out of structural poverty. By the end of the crisis, Du Bois wasn’t just a true anti-racist – he was a Marxist anti-racist.

The two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century changed the face of global politics and reframed America as a leading nation of the modern world. 

The military campaigns abroad also had a huge effect on American society at home. For one, labor shortages during the wars spurred the mass movement of Black people from the rural South to Northern cities. During this Great Migration, over six million Black Americans exercised their freedom and pursued a new life of opportunity in the North.

On top of that, the unifying threat of fascism and the experiences of Black American soldiers abroad brought about a new consciousness of racial inequality. World War II was sold to these soldiers as the Double V Campaign, to reflect the promise that victory in defeating fascism abroad would bring an end to racism and its attendant violence at home. Many joined up in the hope that this pledge would be realized. The fact that it wasn’t sparked renewed vigor in the fight for equality in America.

The key message here is: The advances of the civil rights movement opened the doors for more subtle racist ideas.

A new political consciousness, the pressures of urbanization, and the anti-racist momentum in the aftermath of World War II birthed the civil rights movement.

In the 1950s, the strategic boycotts, sit-ins, and marches of civil rights activists forced a public conversation on racial justice. In the South, these protests were directed at the openly racist system of segregation that still divided schools, shops, and public facilities. Fortunately, the public pressure that civil rights activists generated was effective. In the landmark decision of Brown vs the Board of Education in 1955, for example, the Supreme Court finally ruled that segregating schools was unconstitutional. 

By the early 1960s, presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy had taken up the civil rights cause to appeal to liberal voters. Kennedy’s advocacy culminated in the monumental Civil Rights Act of 1964, which legally ended racist discrimination in the public sphere, as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1955, which addressed the racist tactics of voter suppression.

But yet again, this progress was met with unabashed, racist retaliation from many white people across the US. And to the assimilationsist white folk, the laws passed under Kennedy meant that racial discrimination was officially over, which made it easier for them to reason that any inequality that remained was due to a supposed ineptitude on the part of Black people.

As the civil rights movement progressed, young anti-racists tired of the attendant violent kickback flocked to more radical leaders. Many of them felt that Martin Luther King Jr’s strategy of nonviolent action or passive resistance wasn’t cut out to end the structural inequality of Black people – something King himself acknowledged in later years.

Radical Black pioneers like Malcolm X, on the other hand, didn’t believe in passively doing away with the racist structures that supported American society. Malcolm X called on his fellow Black community to resist racist oppression “by any means necessary.” 

When Malcolm X and later Martin Luther King Jr were assassinated, riots broke out all over America. It became clear to young anti-racists that waiting for and trusting that white America could be persuaded to address the problem of racism wasn’t going to happen without deliberate action. The name given to this moment of active resistance was Black Power. 

Here’s the key message: Angela Davis pioneered a new movement of intersectional anti-racism.

Young pro-Marxist, feminist, and anti-racist activist Angela Davis observed the budding Black Power movement from her studies abroad and immediately returned to America to support the cause. 

Back home, she founded UC San Diego’s Black Student Union and helped build up the Black Panther Party. She also spearheaded the new academic discipline of Black Studies, tying the anti-racist struggle to feminist, queer, and anti-war thought. As a result of this new intersectional awareness, more and more non-Black people started to take up the cause of anti-racism. 

Combined with an economic upswing, this intersectional activism had its effect: By 1973, Black poverty had fallen to its lowest level ever in US history. 

But, once again, wins like this would prove temporary. 

Politicians like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan ushered in a new model of implementing racist policies and perpetuating racist tropes without ever using the terms “Black” or “white.”

For example, in the first half of his presidency, Reagan peddled the myth of the Black “welfare queen” to cut back on federal social programs. In the second half, he ordered the devastating War on Drugs – specifically targeting and criminalizing Black and Latinx people and communities. Even though later studies showed that Black and white people were using illegal drugs at similar rates, the media skewed representation so that Black and Latinx communities became associated with the scourge of drug abuse. The number of imprisoned Black people in America spiked to unprecedented numbers. 

Angela Davis emerged as the principal voice opposing these latest tactics of criminalizing Blackness, and became a firm advocate for prison abolition. 

Reagan’s successors George H. Bush and Bill Clinton embraced the racist image of drug-addicted, welfare-reliant Black criminals to justify ever-tougher crime policies. And both Republicans and Democrats had learned from history that it was easier to sell racist ideas to poor white people than to devise social programs that would benefit poor white and Black Americans alike.

Ever since the civil rights movement, American leaders have been more careful in phrasing the racist ideas they want to sell to the public, and around the turn of the millennium, scientists provided them with new terminology to do so.

The influential 1994 book The Bell Curve, for example, reinvigorated the racist notion of comparing the “intelligence” of different racial groups through standardized tests, without taking into consideration the range of extenuating factors that make the results of such a test unreliable and dangerous. The ideas of the book were used to justify George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2003, which tied school funding to standardized test scores – effectively blaming Black teachers and students for the poor conditions of their schools.

The key message? Racist ideas never went away – but if we fight the racists in power, they won’t hold on forever.

Around the same time that politicians found new sophisticated ways of emphasizing Black people’s “personal responsibility,” many white Americans were declaring themselves “color-blind.” Indeed, Barack Obama’s successful presidential run seemed proof of a new, post-racial America. No one seemed to mind that even Obama often fell into old assimilationist traps. For example, he condemned what he termed the unproductive anger of anti-racists, and urged fellow Black people to take “personal responsibility” for their continued social and economic inequality. 

If even a modern Black president reproduced such tropes, how can we ever hope to stop the cycle of racist ideas? 

History is clear about which strategies don’t work: uplift suasion and educational persuasion, for example. Both of these strategies try to address and reverse racist ideas directly, based on the belief that it’s these racist ideas that produce racist policies. But history suggests that it’s actually the other way around – as long as racist policies exist, brilliant minds will justify them by selling racist ideas to the public. In addition, as the aftermath of Obama’s presidency demonstrated, the sudden uplift of individual Black people as an indicator of progress where racism is concerned inevitably leads to racist backlash.

Getting the white majority on board with racist ideas or policies is easy because these generally benefit white people at the expense of Black people. What the racist ideas obscure is that an equal society would benefit poor and middle-income white people much more than racism does.

This means that it’s not just in the interest of Black Americans, but in the interest of any average white American to challenge racism. The only way to do that is to hold the people in power accountable, by opposing racist policies and pushing for anti-racist ones. Once real anti-racists are in power, the cycle of racist ideas will finally end.