More than 50 years after the Civil Rights Movement and more than 14 years after electing its first Black president, why is the United States still divided along racial lines? That’s the central question of Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, which combines an overarching theory of racism with a detailed history of racist thought in the United States. Kendi’s central argument is that our assumptions about racism are backward: Common wisdom holds that racist ideas lead to racist policies, but Kendi argues that the opposite is true—historically, racist ideas were invented to justify preexisting racist policies and practices created out of economic and political self-interest.
Furthermore, Kendi says, debates about race are complicated by the fact that racist ideas can masquerade as nonracist, leading them to be propagated even by antiracist advocates. Kendi explains that if we don’t understand the true causes of racism, we’ll waste our time trying to fight racism using techniques that history tells us don’t work.
Kendi is a professor of African American Studies and the author of How to Be an Antiracist, a New York Times best seller and the follow-up to Stamped from the Beginning. In 2020, Kendi was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, and in 2021 he was awarded the MacArthur “genius grant” for his work to rectify racism in America.
In Stamped from the Beginning (2016), Kendi develops his arguments through an exhaustive study of American history, politics, and culture. The book is heavily researched and informed by Kendi’s academic training, but it’s aimed at a general audience, particularly those who are interested in understanding and battling anti-Black racism in the US.
This guide organizes Kendi’s arguments into three parts:
Along the way, we’ll make connections between this book and Kendi’s later writings. We’ll also expand upon, and sometimes challenge, Kendi’s ideas by referring to other prominent writers on race such as Robin DiAngelo and Jennifer Eberhardt.
One of the main purposes of Stamped from the Beginning is to articulate a new theory of racist ideas—which he argues is necessary if we’re to effectively fight racism. Kendi makes two major conceptual claims in this book. First, he argues that racist ideas are invented to justify racist policies already in place. If we don’t realize this, he says, we’ll mistakenly try to address racism by fighting racist ideas when it would be more effective to fight racist policies. Second, he argues that debates about race encompass three possible stances—segregationism, assimilationism, and antiracism. He suggests that if we don’t learn to recognize all three stances, we might accidentally perpetuate racist ideas.
Defining “Racism” and “Race”
Racism is a charged term, so before going further, it’s a good idea to establish its definition and usage in this guide.
In Stamped from the Beginning, Kendi defines racism as “any concept that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group in any way.” In other words, racism doesn’t require hatred or discrimination—it only requires believing that any race is better or worse than another. As we’ll see, this definition will be important for understanding Kendi’s arguments about the different kinds of thoughts about race.
However, this definition raises another question: What is race? Kendi never explicitly defines the term in Stamped from the Beginning, but in How to Be an Antiracist, he defines it as a hierarchical group into which people are sorted. He argues that race isn’t based on culture, ethnicity, or biological difference—instead, he says, it’s a purely political construct. As we’ll see, that construct changes over time depending on which era and which culture we’re looking at. But in any case, it’s important to note that despite centuries of pseudoscientific claims of racial difference, contemporary science has found no significant biological difference between so-called racial groups.
Kendi argues that while most people think that ignorance and hatred lead to racist policies, the reality is the exact opposite: People who are motivated by economic or political self-interest introduce racist policies, they justify these policies by inventing racist ideas, then those racist ideas take hold and produce ignorance and hatred.
In Kendi’s account of American anti-Black racism, the original racist policy was the African slave trade, which slave traders and enslavers justified by inventing ideas about Black inferiority.
(Shortform note: Although Kendi describes Stamped from the Beginning as a “definitive history” of American racism, it would be more accurate to describe it as a history of White American racism against Black Americans. In fact, several reviewers have critiqued the book for neglecting alternative historical accounts of racist thought and failing to discuss racism against other groups or in other cultures. While these topics are perhaps beyond Kendi’s chosen scope, it’s worth bearing in mind that racism is an even bigger, more complex issue than it appears in this book.)
As we’ll see in Part 2, much of Kendi’s book is dedicated to tracking the evolution of these policies and ideas over time. Kendi argues that it’s crucial to understand the policy-first nature of racism because otherwise, we’re likely to take the wrong approach to combating racism. In other words, if we believe that racism stems from hatred and ignorance, we’ll focus on educating racists to show them the illogic and factual inaccuracy of racist ideas—an approach that can’t possibly work because racist ideas don’t come from ignorance in the first place.
Do Racist Policies Really Come First?
As Kendi says, not all experts agree with his claim that racist policies precede racist ideas. In fact, there are reasons to think that unconscious prejudice or bias might come first, with racist thoughts and policies developing from this bias.
For one thing, our brains might inherently tend toward “us-and-them” thinking that results in racism. For example, in Biased, Jennifer Eberhardt argues that our brains divide the world into simplified categories for easier processing. One major form of this categorization seems to be dividing people into different races. In fact, some studies suggest that infants develop a preference for faces of their own race when they are just six to nine months old. Clearly, these infants’ racial preferences must have more to do with familiarity than with racist ideas or policies.
Moreover, there’s some evidence that humans may simply be wired to fear people who seem different from themselves. For example, one study found that children with a genetic disorder that inhibits their fear of strangers are significantly less likely to apply stereotypes to members of other races than are children without the disorder. Similarly, another study shows that having positive interactions with members of another race improves your ability to recognize and distinguish faces of that race.
In short, rather than there being a clear cause-and-effect relationship between racist policies and racist ideas (as Kendi suggests), it may be the case that hardwired biases lead to both racist practices and racist ideas, with each of these three elements (bias, racist ideas, and racist practices) reinforcing and justifying the others.
With that said, history and current events seem to support Kendi’s claim that eradicating racism isn’t as simple as educating people about their misconceptions about other races. Whatever the underlying cause of racism, it’s certainly the case that over time, racist policies and ideas have become embedded in our social structures and our cultural discourses.
While we might assume that ideas are either racist or nonracist, Kendi’s other major theoretical argument is that there are three types of thoughts on race: segregationist, antiracist, and assimilationist. When we think about racist ideas, we tend to think about openly hateful, hostile, or discriminatory rhetoric. But as we’ll see, Kendi’s three positions show that racist thinking can take subtler forms and even disguise itself as nonracist:
1) Segregationist ideas blame racial disparities on Black people by proposing that they’re inferior or defective in some way. These are the kinds of ideas we’d typically identify as racist. For example, a segregationist explanation for the low number of Black Fortune 500 CEOs might be that Black people lack the intelligence and motivation to be business leaders.
2) Antiracist ideas blame racial disparities solely on racism and maintain that all races are equal. An antiracist explanation for the lack of Black Fortune 500 CEOs might be that hiring and promotion procedures discriminate against Black candidates and employees.
3) Assimilationist ideas blame racial disparities on Black people and on racism. Assimilationist ideas can take two forms—they can maintain that both Black people and racist Whites are at fault, or they can propose that Black people are defective as a result of racism.
For example, the first type of assimilationism might explain the low number of Black Fortune 500 CEOs by saying that hiring policies are discriminatory and that many Black people lack the skills to be business executives (such an explanation might even suggest that businesses should try harder to find the few qualified Black people out there).
The second type of assimilationism is especially pernicious because its racism is subtler—for example, it might argue that after centuries of racial discrimination, most Black people can’t imagine themselves in leadership roles. As Kendi points out, an idea like this seems to place the blame on racism, but in doing so, it also promotes the idea that Black people are inferior (even if the inferiority isn’t their fault, but was caused by racism).
Racist Thoughts Affect Everyone
Part of Kendi’s goal in identifying these three stances on race is to show how racist ideas don’t just reside with openly racist White supremacists—they affect how everyone thinks, regardless of one’s own race or one’s support or opposition for racist policies and ideas. For example, in Part 2 of this guide, we’ll see that throughout history, both Black and White advocates against racism have harbored racist ideas without even realizing it.
Likewise, because we tend to think of racism as explicit hatred for other racial groups—and because most people don’t hold this hatred—it can be hard to recognize the impact racism has on the world. In White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo argues that many White Americans aren’t explicitly racist, but nonetheless view the world through a racialized lens. As Arlie Russell Hochschild argues in Strangers in Their Own Land, this is partly because the institution of slavery came to define what it meant to be White just as much as what it meant to be Black.
The irony is that systemic racism has even harmed some members of the race it ostensibly benefits. According to Hochschild, racism is part of the paradoxical mix of beliefs and values that leads many poor White people to persistently vote against their own interests and support policies that keep them impoverished. Meanwhile, in Caste, Isabel Wilkerson argues that middle- to lower-income White Americans have suffered increased death rates from suicide, drug overdoses, and similar causes as a direct result of their loss of dominant-group status in the wake of the Civil Rights movement.
Now that we’ve discussed Kendi’s overarching theoretical principles—namely, the policy-first nature of racism and the segregationist/assimilationist/antiracist trichotomy—we’ll see how these principles play out in the context of American history. The bulk of Kendi’s book is an extensive study of the history of American racist thought through five time periods, each of which covers a major era in US history and assigns an important historical figure as a “guide” to that period. The five time periods are:
1) The early colonial period. The representative of this period is Cotton Mather, perhaps the most influential preacher in colonial New England. Mather owned slaves and argued that slavery benefited Black people.
2) The founding of the United States and the first few decades of the new country. The representative of this period is Thomas Jefferson, the third US President and the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson owned slaves and held ambivalent views about slavery.
3) The American Civil War and the periods just before and after it. The representative of this period is William Lloyd Garrison, a publisher and one of the loudest public advocates for the abolition of slavery. Kendi explains that Garrison opposed slavery while propagating racist assimilationist attitudes about Black people.
4) The post-Civil War Reconstruction and the ensuing Jim Crow era up through the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. The representative of this period is W.E.B. Du Bois, a prominent Black scholar and activist. According to Kendi, Du Bois initially advocated assimilationist ideas before eventually adopting antiracist ideas.
5) The Civil Rights movement through the present. The representative of this period is Angela Davis, a Black feminist scholar and activist. According to Kendi, Davis has consistently argued for antiracist as well as other antidiscriminatory policies (for example, feminist and pro-LGBTQ platforms).
As we explore each of these periods of history, we’ll focus on the prominent racist policies, ideas, and debates that characterize each era.
(Shortform note: Kendi’s intent isn’t to provide a detailed biography of each figure, nor necessarily to explore each era from that person’s perspective per se. Instead, each figure is a symbol of the era in which he or she lived and a shorthand for the development of racist and antiracist ideas over time.)
Did Slavery Cause Racism?
Though Kendi’s explicit claim is that racist ideas follow in the wake of any racist policies, his account firmly roots American racism in the institution of slavery: Justifications for slavery lead to the first racist ideas, two of Kendi’s five historical figures are enslavers (a third is an abolitionist), and he makes it clear that contemporary racist rhetoric still recycles ideas that first appeared under slavery.
As we move through Kendi’s history, it’s worth pointing out that not all experts agree with Kendi’s account of slavery leading to racism. For example, some scholars argue that slavery hasn’t always had racial implications, while others suggest that racism first appeared in ancient Greece, thousands of years before the European and American slave trades that Kendi identifies as the source of racism. On the other hand, some writers state slavery’s influence even more strongly than Kendi. For example, the essays in The 1619 Project collectively argue that enslaved Americans were responsible for America’s democracy and prosperity.
Kendi begins his history in 17th century Colonial New England with Cotton Mather, a popular preacher from a prominent family. Mather is important to Kendi’s story because he advocated one of the early justifications for slavery—the idea that White enslavers could save Black souls by converting them to Christianity. Other important developments in this period include a foundational debate about the nature of race and some of the first political moves designed to pit White commoners against Black people.
According to Kendi, the first anti-Black racism comes with the start of the African slave trade and demonstrates the principle that racist practices come first and are then justified by racist ideas. Around 200 years before England established its first colonies in what became the US, Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal began trading in African slaves. Kendi explains that this was purely a business decision—Henry didn’t want to work with established Muslim slave traders, and he also saw an opportunity to enter an emerging market (African slaves) as the previously dominant market (Slavic slaves) waned.
(Shortform note: Though slavery carries unavoidable racial connotations in the context of US history, the practice of slavery isn’t inherently racist. Slavery appears to predate recorded human history, and most human cultures have at some time enslaved prisoners of war, debtors, and other groups. According to some experts, the reason racism emerged alongside the early modern slave trade was the need to justify chattel slavery—the practice of owning humans as though they were property (not all forms of slavery follow this model, which is partly why slavery still exists today). In other words, the argument is that in order to treat people as property, it’s necessary to define those people as non-human or at least as inferior humans—and this is the basic logic of racism.)
Kendi says that after Henry’s death in 1460, his nephew and biographer obscured these financial motives by arguing that Henry was concerned with uplifting and spiritually saving the Africans by moving them to better conditions in Portugal and introducing them to Christianity. Over the next several hundred years, slavery became an important part of the European and Colonial economies. The first African slaves reached the future US in 1619, when an English captain raided a Spanish slave ship and then sold a group of “20 and odd” captives to the governor of Virginia. By this time, Kendi says, enslavers had firmly established the idea that Africans were beasts who were better off in European and American servitude.
According to Kendi, this rhetoric reached its peak with Mather (1663-1728), whose main contribution was to conflate White and Black as racial categories with white and black as descriptors of moral character. In doing so, he perpetuated the idea that slavery was benevolent. Around 1706, Mather argued that Black people were savage and immoral by nature, but that all people had (or were capable of having) white souls if they accepted Christianity and their God-given place in the social hierarchy. As we’ll see, Kendi suggests that the idea that Black people need White leadership has persisted ever since.
(Shortform note: This same religious logic was used to justify the exploitation and oppression of numerous groups throughout history. For example, some early European explorers in the Americas claimed a missionary purpose in order to justify exploiting native inhabitants, while others opposed this exploitation on similar missionary grounds (since it’s harder to convert people who’ve been abused in the name of the religion you’re trying to spread). Similarly, the desire to “civilize” native populations by spreading Christianity provided part of the justification for European imperial influences in Africa, India, and elsewhere.)
In order to describe Black people as an inferior race, enslavers had to explain what a race was in the first place. Kendi explains that ethnic and color discrimination began with the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who argued that lighter and darker skin was caused by colder or warmer climates. However, Kendi says that as early modern European explorers saw more of the world and encountered new peoples, they realized that this climate theory didn’t hold up.
Instead, they posited that dark-skinned peoples were descendants of the Biblical figure Ham, one of Noah’s sons who was cursed by his father and God. Kendi explains that at this time, “race” simply meant “descent”—so by saying Black people were descended from Ham, Europeans first conceived of the idea that Black people were a distinct (and cursed) “race.”
In contrast to this lineal explanation of race, Kendi says that some other thinkers posited an alternative theory—that different races came from different acts of creation, making them essentially different biological species. This idea was technically heretical (since it contradicted the Biblical creation story), but it persisted for centuries, eventually evolving into a variety of scientific hierarchies of different human “subspecies.” These two theories—that different races result from either one act of creation or several—are known as monogenesis and polygenesis.
Race and Skin Color
Although modern understandings of race are inextricably linked to skin color, this wasn’t always the case. For example, some scholars argue that the ancient Greeks defined race according to factors like language and manner of dress. Others point out that “white” and “black” first appeared as quasi-racial identifiers only around 1680, when colonists of European descent in the Americas used the terms to distinguish themselves as free people in contrast to slaves of African descent.
Meanwhile, experts suggest that racial colorism began with Carl Linnaeus’s division of humanity into four subspecies (which Kendi also mentions in the slightly different context of racial hierarchies). For Linnaeus, one of the defining qualities of different types of humans was their skin color—which for him carried meanings that dated back to humoral medicine, an ancient theory that proposed that the human body contains four substances: blood (red), phlegm (white), black bile, and yellow bile.
Therefore, when Linnaeus characterized Asian people as “yellow” or indigenous Americans as “red,” he wasn’t just describing their skin color—he was also assigning them qualities such as greediness (associated with yellow bile) or cheerfulness (associated with blood). Over time, this color theory became increasingly associated with race to the point where we see them as one in the same—but it’s worth remembering that even this association between race and skin color is an arbitrary construct.
Kendi finishes by saying that the Colonial period saw the first uses of policy to pit non-enslaving White people against Black people. Kendi points to Bacon’s Rebellion (1676-7), in which planter Nathaniel Bacon led a group of poor Whites as well as free and enslaved Black people against the Virginia governor. The rebellion failed, but it scared Colonial authorities by showing them the power of people uniting along socioeconomic—rather than racial—lines.
In response, the government pardoned the White rebels, harshly punished the Black rebels, and developed White militias to guard against future slave uprisings. Kendi explains that these policies were designed to prevent future cooperation between White and Black people by establishing and enforcing a racial hierarchy. By publicly elevating poor White people above Black people, the authorities created animosity between the two groups and kept poor Whites focused on policing Black people rather than worrying about their own exploitation by richer White people.
(Shortform note: This tactic of placing poor White people above Black people has lasting consequences even today. In Strangers in Their Own Land, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild argues that many White Southerners grew accustomed to basing their social status in part on their Whiteness, which guaranteed that they were never at the bottom of the social ladder. As a result, Hochschild says, such people see any move toward Black equality as a threat to their own statuses and identities, which might help explain the antipathy some Southerners still feel toward non-White Americans.)
By the time the Colonies began to fight for their independence (starting in the 1760s with discontent about British policies and culminating with 1776’s Declaration of Independence), slavery and the racist ideas it engendered were entrenched in American society. But at the same time, racist ideas were transformed by the Enlightenment—an intellectual movement that ran throughout 18th-century Europe, sparked by advances in philosophy and science.
Enlightenment thinkers promoted political ideals of democracy and universal equality, which challenged the institution of racism. But meanwhile, Enlightenment science—with its emphasis on rationality and order—created a biological hierarchy of races (with Europeans, who deemed themselves to be the most rational race, on top). Kendi suggests that no one embodied these tensions more than Thomas Jefferson, whose conflicted attitudes about race helped shape the country in its early years. Meanwhile, Kendi says, this period contains the first examples of antislavery sentiment and its assimilationist logic.
According to Kendi, the Declaration of Independence reveals a contradiction in its author’s thinking. In the Declaration, the slave-holding Jefferson asserts that “all men are created equal”—resulting in an ambiguity that Kendi says reflects Jefferson’s larger ambivalence about race, as expressed in his often contradictory writings and actions. Kendi gives the following examples:
In short, Kendi suggests that like many people in this period, Jefferson found himself caught between his intellectual ideals (which opposed slavery and racism) and his economic and political self-interest (which supported his continued enslavement of Black people).
What America’s Founders Thought About Slavery
Like Jefferson, most of America’s founders enslaved people. But while Kendi suggests that Jefferson’s attitudes reflect a general ambivalence about slavery among the founders as a whole, that doesn’t appear to be the case. In fact, other historians suggest that many of the founders eventually opposed slavery and wished to see it abolished. For example, George Washington—whom Kendi critiques for his hesitation to publicly oppose slavery during the Revolutionary War—eventually came to regret enslaving others, and when he died, he freed the people he’d enslaved.
Likewise, many of the colonies had started moving toward abolition by the Revolutionary period. In fact, many Northern states did indeed abolish slavery during or immediately after the war—though their economies remained tied to slave-based Southern agriculture. This conflict of interests led to a number of protections for slavery in the Constitution—most notoriously, the definition of a Black slave as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of Congressional representation.
In short, Revolutionary-era attitudes about slavery are perhaps more nuanced than Kendi lets on. And yet, in framing the Constitution, the founders demonstrated Kendi’s fundamental claim on a grand scale: By prioritizing the new union and its economic success over their moral objections to slavery, the founders accepted a racist policy as a way to achieve what they saw as the interests of the new nation.
During the Colonial era, pro-slavery forces found support in new scientific attitudes about race. Kendi explains that from around 1730 to 1760, Enlightenment scientists like taxonomist Carl Linnaeus established pseudoscientific racial hierarchies that placed Europeans at the top (attributing to them qualities like intelligence, ingenuity, and lawfulness) and Africans at the bottom (citing traits like laziness, neglectfulness, and capriciousness). These hierarchies inspired similar hierarchies within the slave trade, as enslavers ranked slaves according to their national and ethnic origins, which were thought to determine a slave’s utility for various kinds of work.
Kendi points out that these kinds of hierarchies served two social purposes. First, they justified slavery by perpetuating the idea that Black people were inferior and benefited from slavery’s civilizing influence. Second, they helped prevent slave uprisings by widening the rift between poor White people and poor and enslaved Black people while also introducing racist divides within enslaved populations by ranking some slaves as “better” than others.
(Shortform note: Racial hierarchies may serve an additional purpose—imposing order on society. In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari argues that social hierarchies exist because they offer guidelines for interacting with people you don’t know personally. In other words, Harari argues that hierarchies—especially when they’re based on visual cues like skin color—help us determine who to interact with and how. Similarly, in Caste, Isabel Wilkerson argues that American racism is best understood as a caste system, meaning that it serves as the basis of social order by dividing people into groups and prescribing appropriate behaviors and lifestyles for each group.)
In the face of ongoing slavery and racism, some Black people and White reformers began to publicly argue for the abolition of slavery. While abolitionist arguments in America date back to the late 1600s, opposition to slavery gathered momentum through the 18th century, culminating in the gradual passage (from 1780-1804) of antislavery laws in Northern states. Kendi says that one of the main approaches in this early abolitionist movement was to demonstrate that Black people were (or could be) equal to their White counterparts. Kendi calls this approach uplift suasion—the idea that if Black people prove their intellectual, moral, or other capabilities, White people will realize that their racist ideas are wrong.
Unfortunately, Kendi says, this tactic was doomed from the beginning. For one thing, as we’ve seen, slavery existed not because enslavers believed in racist ideas, but because they benefited from slavery. Therefore, even if you discredited the ideas, the benefit remained and so would the institution.
You Can’t Persuade Away Racism
The logic of uplift suasion is similar to another kind of persuasion-based antiracism strategy called “education suasion.” In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi explains that education suasion assumes that White people are racist because they don’t know any better. By this theory, you can eliminate racism by teaching White people not to be racist—for example, by pointing to examples of high-achieving Black people, or by explaining how racist policies harm people.
According to Kendi, the problem with both uplift suasion and education suasion is that nothing can persuade away racist ideas. First, as we’ve seen, Kendi believes that racism doesn’t come from ignorance, but from racist policies. As a result, educating the average White person (who has no say over those policies) won’t accomplish anything. He also points out that racist policy makers are likely already aware of the effects of their policies, meaning that there’s nothing to educate them about.
Moreover, even if education had a chance of working, it can be difficult to get people to recognize and confront their own biases. As Robin DiAngelo argues in White Fragility, some White people react defensively to even the suggestion that they might be racist—a fact that makes it hard to even have conversations about race and racism.
Additionally, it was easy for racists to ignore evidence that contradicted their ideas. Kendi points out that when confronted with well-educated, articulate, and literate Black people, such as Cambridge-educated Francis Williams and published poet Phillis Wheatley, White racists dismissed them as “extraordinary negroes” who were exceptions to the general rule of Black inferiority.
(Shortform note: The “extraordinary negro” idea is still around today. For example, Kendi points out that in 2007, then-Senator Joe Biden described Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Meanwhile, other commentators at the time debated whether a “good Black” like Obama was “Black enough” to appeal to fellow Black voters—and more recently, similar debates have arisen about Vice President Kamala Harris. There are two problems with this line of thought. First, it implies that all Black people are a certain way, and second, it implies that successful Black people don’t fit a standard Black “mold” (that is, they are extraordinary exceptions).)
Moreover, Kendi says, the basic logic of uplift is inherently racist. By suggesting that Black people can prove their worth by achieving White standards of intelligence, learning, culture, and so on, uplift implies that White standards are the superior standards to which all races should aspire (in the process dismissing any culture other than that of post-Enlightenment Western Europe).
(Shortform note: In White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo argues that these default White standards even pervade our language. She points out that we frequently use terms like “African American,” “Asian American,” “Latino American,” and so on, but rarely say things like “White American” or “Caucasian American.” She argues that this is because as a society, we see Whiteness as the default form of American citizenship and identity.)
Plus, Kendi points out, uplift shifts the blame for racial disparities onto Black people. If some Black people can “better” themselves by adopting White ideals, the implication is that “lesser” Black people have only themselves to blame for their situations and for racism itself. If only Black people as a whole behaved better, the logic goes, people would view and treat them better.
(Shortform note: Another possible reason the uplift approach is ineffective is that people can struggle to differentiate between members of other races. In Biased, Jennifer Eberhardt argues that our brains’ preference for simplicity causes us to reduce groups other than our own to broad categories—a phenomenon she calls the “other-race effect.” The other-race effect explains why people sometimes proclaim that members of another racial group “all look alike”—and it may explain why White racists saw people like Williams and Wheatley as exceptions to the larger Black category rather than as evidence that disproved their racist preconceptions.)
By the 19th century, the abolition movement had gathered momentum that would ultimately culminate in the American Civil War (1861-65). But as Kendi points out, anti-slavery thought wasn’t always antiracist thought—in fact, abolitionists frequently reproduced racist assimilationist ideas that cast Black people as having been reduced to helpless brutes by slavery. Kendi argues that this dichotomy is exemplified by William Lloyd Garrison, one of the country’s most vocal and influential abolitionists. Kendi also points out that during this period, there was an increasing interest in deporting Black people to Africa, as well as an increase in racial tensions among Black people and between Black and White people.
One of the counterintuitive insights of Kendi’s book is that it’s possible to oppose one form of racism while perpetuating another—as was the case with Garrison’s abolitionist movement, which was popular from the 1830s until slavery ended in 1865. Kendi argues that, like many of his time, Garrison believed that Black people needed White people to rescue them from slavery and uplift their minds and spirits. Though an advocate of immediate and total emancipation, Garrison argued that enslaved Black people should wait for White and free Black abolitionists to effect a political solution to slavery. (Yet, as Kendi notes, during the Civil War, thousands of Black people required no help to free themselves by running from their plantations, volunteering for the Union army, and so on.)
(Shortform note: Garrison’s view demonstrates what might today be called a White savior complex—a phenomenon that arises when White people attempt to help people from other racial groups in ways that reflect an attitude of superiority. While there’s nothing wrong with helping others, experts explain that the problem arises when White people assume that they have knowledge, skills, or resources that the affected group lacks and when they don’t take into account the wants and needs of the people they’re helping. Not only is White saviorism racist and insulting, it can make problems worse by convincing saviors they’ve solved a problem when they haven’t fixed the underlying inequities that caused the problem in the first place.)
Garrison wasn’t the only abolitionist to take a paternalistic stance toward the Black people he meant to help. Kendi points to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which had immense influence on the abolitionist movement. Kendi argues that the novel introduced the new racist stereotype of the extraordinarily spiritual Black person in Uncle Tom, a man weak of body but strong of soul. He explains that Uncle Tom played into preexisting stereotypes of weak Black men unfit to lead themselves—let alone a family, political movement, or nation. Portrayals like this reinforced the idea that Black people needed White people to come to their rescue.
(Shortform note: This spiritual-Black-people stereotype persists in the contemporary fiction trope of the “magical negro”—a stock character defined by his or her good sense, folk wisdom, and mystical powers (which may include healing, clairvoyance, or a special connection to God). Not only does the magical negro reinforce racist stereotypes, but it also marginalizes Black characters by reducing them to sidekicks, guides, or advisers to a White protagonist. Moreover, some scholars warn that when we depict Black people as possessing superhuman traits, we may raise the chances that police resort to violence when interacting with Black citizens.)
Part of the justification for this paternalistic approach was the idea that slavery had turned Black people into the savages it claimed them to be. Kendi argues that this is classic assimilationist logic: Whereas enslavers argued that Black people were inherently inferior, many emancipationists argued that Black people had been made inferior by slavery’s abuses. Kendi points out that both of these stances are racist because both proclaim that Black people are inferior (they differ only in their assessment of who’s at fault for that inferiority). Yet, against Black protests to the contrary, many emancipationists clung to the idea that slavery had left Black people incapable of caring for themselves or joining in society.
How to Defend Racist Policies by Decrying Racism
One of the points Kendi makes throughout the book is that racist ideas are incredibly flexible—they can be stretched, twisted, and otherwise repurposed as needed to support essentially any racist policy. The idea that slavery made Black people inferior provides a particularly vivid example of this principle.
As noted, this idea was initially conceived as racist argument against a racist policy (slavery). But in recent years, the inherent racism of this abolitionist stance has been used to defend ongoing racial disparities by attacking those who call attention to them. For instance, some conservative politicians and commentators have attacked Critical Race Theory (CRT)—an academic movement that studies the relationships between race, racism, power, economics, politics, history, and more—for its supposed anti-Americanism and anti-White racism.
One common argument from this camp is that CRT teaches Black people to see themselves as helpless victims. The implication is that CRT itself is racist because it proposes that Black people are unequal—just as emancipationists suggested hundreds of years earlier. In a 2021 editorial, Kendi argues that this odd rhetorical inversion—which suggests that those fighting against racism are actually perpetuating it—is a political smokescreen designed to draw attention away from current policies that are actually causing racial inequity.
Kendi says that as abolitionists fought to end slavery, others debated what to do with Black people if they were freed. Since the Colonial era, there had been arguments that slavery was wrong, but that Black people could never live among White people (Kendi cites one such opinion from as early as 1700). As this notion proliferated over the years, it gradually inspired the idea of recolonization—the mass deportation of Black people to Africa. Kendi explains that this idea held both segregationist and assimilationist appeals, as it would keep Black people from tainting White society while also allowing those Black people who had been “uplifted” by White influence to improve the lots of the more “primitive” native Africans they encountered.
Although recolonization was an extreme idea, it had a lot of political traction. Kendi says that Jefferson endorsed it for much of his life, and in 1821, his friend and fifth US President James Monroe allowed the American Colonization Society to acquire land in Africa (in what’s now Liberia) to use as a colony for freed American slaves. Kendi notes that even Abraham Lincoln—now remembered as the “Great Emancipator”—preferred the idea of sending Black Americans to Liberia rather than setting them free in their own country.
(Shortform note: The idea that non-Whites should leave America is still alive and well. For example, in 2020, then-President Donald Trump tweeted that four Congress members of color—Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib—should “go back” to their own countries, prompting his supporters to chant “Send her back!” in reference to Omar (the only one of the four women to be born outside the United States). As commentators noted at the time, the logic behind these chants is similar to the logic behind recolonization—the idea in both cases is that non-Whites don’t share White America’s values and therefore shouldn’t be part of American society.)
As Kendi points out, recolonization is racist because it implies that Black people aren’t American—even though by the time of the Civil War, some Black families had been in the country for almost 250 years. Kendi also notes that Black opponents of recolonization in the 1810s protested against being sent to the “savage wilds of Africa”—an attitude that reflects the extent to which Black Americans had absorbed racist White perceptions of the continent.
(Shortform note: Recolonization also implies that all of Africa is the same when in fact, the continent is home to a wide range of geographical and cultural diversity. To suggest that all Black people would be “at home” in Liberia (or any specific place in Africa) is to elide that diversity and reduce all African peoples to a monolithic “other.”)
From the end of the Civil War in 1865 until 1877, the US underwent a period of Reconstruction in which Congress passed a set of constitutional amendments intended to guarantee civil rights to newly freed Black people, and government officials and Northern citizens alike attempted to protect and enforce these new rights in the South. Kendi notes that White racists responded to these efforts first with violence, then with new laws (known as Jim Crow laws) designed to reestablish segregation and discrimination while spreading false notions of Black criminality.
Amid these political and social struggles, Kendi says, uplift suasion found renewed voice in the person of W.E.B. Du Bois, a black scholar and activist who spent much of his life promoting both antiracist and assimilationist ideas before adopting an uncompromising antiracist stance in his later years.
According to Kendi, Du Bois’s most influential early work (The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903) reveals a tension between racist and antiracist thought. Kendi cites Du Bois’s concept of double-consciousness—the idea that Black Americans simultaneously see themselves through their own eyes and through the eyes of a racist White world. Kendi argues that this idea is both antiracist (because it validates Black peoples’ experiences and points of view) and assimilationist (because it reinforces the idea that Black people should always be on their best behavior in order to impress White onlookers).
This assimilationist tendency led Du Bois to promote the idea of the Talented Tenth—the highest-achieving 10% of the Black population. Du Bois argued that highly educated Black people should seek public office and business leadership so as to lead their less accomplished racial brethren to a better life. By stepping into the public spotlight, Kendi says, Du Bois believed that elite Black people would set an example for their own race and prove Black worth to White racists.
(Shortform note: Kendi’s treatment of double-consciousness fails to capture its rich philosophical and psychological depth. In fact, the idea of double-consciousness has inspired generations of scholarship on race and ethnicity. For example, in The Black Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy reinterprets double-consciousness to argue that there’s a unique Black culture that combines elements of African, American, Caribbean, and British cultures—a claim that has little to do with Kendi’s description of double-consciousness as a dichotomy between antiracism and assimilationism.)
At the same time that Du Bois was promoting Black education and achievement, racist laws emerged that found new ways to marginalize Black people. These laws began after the Compromise of 1877, when, in order to settle the contested 1876 Presidential election in their favor, Northern Republicans removed the federal troops who had been enforcing civil rights in the South. Between 1890 and 1910, Southern states passed laws called Jim Crow laws that allowed segregation and severely limited Black civil liberties. These laws stayed in effect until 1965.
Kendi points out that Jim Crow laws were possible because early antiracist laws only targeted racist policy language (rather than guarding against racist outcomes). This oversight allowed laws that were technically legal (because they avoided racist language) but that discriminated against Black people (for example, by requiring subjective civics tests before allowing people to vote). This tactic was strengthened by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), a Supreme Court ruling establishing that racial differences were real and that states could discriminate on racial grounds so long as they provided “equal” accommodations.
A Brief History of Anti-Black Voter Suppression
One of the most insidious and pervasive Jim Crow practices was the suppression of the Black vote that was supposed to be guaranteed by the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870. Whereas some Jim Crow policies (like legal segregation) have gone away, voter suppression remains a concern to this day.
As early as 1890, Mississippi built poll taxes and literacy tests into its constitution in an explicit move to “exclude the Negro” from politics by exploiting the lower educational and socioeconomic status of Black men as compared to their White counterparts. Soon, this “Mississippi Plan” proliferated throughout other (mostly Southern) states.
Another provision of Mississippi’s constitution stripped voting rights from convicted felons for the rest of their lives. Such a policy disproportionately targets Black people because, as discussed below, Black people are disproportionately convicted of crimes. Yet criminal disenfranchisement is still relatively widespread—as of 2021, 11 states restrict voting rights even for people who have completely finished their sentences.
Meanwhile, in 2021, Georgia passed voting laws that make it harder to vote early or by mail, methods that had become popular in majority-Black areas as an antidote to long lines and insufficient polling locations. Likewise, Georgia and other states have capitalized on spurious accusations of voter fraud to pass strict voter ID requirements that disproportionately block non-White citizens from voting.
Kendi says that part of the justification for this widespread discrimination was the notion that Black people were dangerous and needed to be controlled. He argues that the post-Civil War era spurred the disproportionate arrest and prosecution of Black people—whose widespread incarceration was then used as evidence of Black criminality. Kendi argues that even as White racists began regularly lynching Black people for even the slightest of perceived misdeeds, this mob violence became evidence of Black moral turpitude. For example, in an address to Congress, President Theodore Roosevelt declared that Black rapists were the number one cause of lynchings.
(Shortform note: According to legal scholar Michelle Alexander, after the Civil War, racist Whites used a combination of criminal codes and extrajudicial killings to reestablish the same social hierarchy and labor exploitation that had been in place under slavery. In The New Jim Crow, Alexander explains that many Southern states passed laws allowing them to arrest Black people for crimes like vagrancy and then lease these prisoners into low-paying or unpaid labor. Meanwhile, as Isabel Wilkerson points out in Caste, racist terrorist practices like lynching reinforced White supremacy while suppressing Black resistance to the social order.)
By the mid-20th century, civil rights activists were finally making some headway toward political and social change. Yet Kendi argues that many social changes only succeeded because of White self-interest, and as a result, they had the side effect of reinforcing old racist ideas and inspiring new ones. For Kendi, this period is exemplified by Angela Davis, a Black academic and political activist whose work highlights feminist as well as racial concerns—and whose imprisonment in the 1970s illustrates both the racial biases of the prison system and the way racist leaders have sometimes used the criminal justice system to shut down their political opponents.
Kendi says that following World War II, the US wished to be seen as the leader of the “free world” and win influence in global politics and economic markets—including those that were emerging as various countries won their independence from their former European colonizers. In this context, Kendi argues, President Dwight Eisenhower realized that the US’s obvious racism and prejudice would hurt the country’s global image—especially as the rest of the world began to see the violent oppression and abuse of Black activists at the hands of White law enforcement officials in the South.
(Shortform note: In other words, just as self-interest can lead to racist policies that then lead to racist ideas, so too can self-interest lead to antiracist policies and ideas. For example, in Hidden Figures, Margot Lee Shetterly says that during World War II, government research groups began hiring women and Black people out of necessity because so many White men were serving overseas. Likewise, Shetterly argues that during the Space Race, it became obvious that segregation limited the US’s potential for scientific achievement. In both cases, leaders began to support Black and female equality—not because they initially held antiracist or antisexist ideas, but because national interest compelled them to change their policies.)
Kendi suggests that this political self-concern helped open the door for integration in the 1950s and new civil rights laws in the 1960s. But when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he says, they inadvertently created a new racist myth. Kendi argues that by proclaiming equality without addressing the historical and ongoing inequities that put Black people at a disadvantage, the act suggested that Black people were now on an equal playing field and that if they didn’t excel in equal measure to White people, their failure to do so proved their fundamental (racial) inadequacy.
(Shortform note: In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo argues that the playing field still isn’t level today. For instance, she points out that non-Whites face discrimination when applying to college, making them less likely than their White peers to earn college degrees. This in turn disproportionately limits job prospects for non-White people, who face further discrimination from employers if their names “sound Black” or “ethnic.” Oluo says that these disadvantages lead to a cascade of socioeconomic consequences for non-Whites, who face a racial wealth gap, housing discrimination, and more.)
Moreover, Kendi says, the legal successes of the Civil Rights movement inspired politicians to adopt newer, less blatant ways of signaling their racist intent. Kendi points to Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” as an early example of racist code language. Nixon capitalized on the racist myth of Black criminality in 1968 by campaigning on “law and order” and criticizing laws that had strengthened the “criminal” elements.
Kendi argues that Nixon knew many of his listeners would hear “criminals” as “Black people,” which allowed him to run a racist campaign without ever openly mentioning race. Kendi suggests that this tactic has continued ever since, with terms like “welfare queen” (popularized by Ronald Reagan in 1976) and “thug” (which began taking on racial overtones in the 2010s) allowing public officials to disparage Black people with pseudo-neutral language.
(Shortform note: Although the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy was in part based on racist signaling, according to political science professor Angie Maxwell, race wasn’t the Southern Strategy’s only talking point, nor was Nixon its only proponent. Maxwell argues that throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Republican Party strengthened its Southern support by aligning itself with traditional gender roles (which reinforced Southern conceptions of White womanhood). In the 1990s, Maxwell says, Republicans cemented their hold over the South by associating themselves with Evangelical Christianity.)
According to Kendi, racist leaders didn’t always limit themselves to encoding racist language in discussions of crime—they actually used the criminal justice system as a means of oppression. Kendi points to the 1970 imprisonment of Angela Davis—who had already twice been fired from her assistant professorship for her Communist Party ties and her political speeches—as an example of the unwarranted legal scrutiny he suggests was sometimes aimed at Black leaders. Likewise, Kendi points to Ronald Reagan’s “war on drugs” in the 1980s—a war that Kendi says disproportionately targeted Black people for arrest and imprisonment and perpetuated the idea that Black communities are inherently crime-ridden.
(Shortform note: In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that the war on drugs has made the myth of Black criminality into a self-fulfilling prophecy. She suggests that current drug laws disproportionately push Black men into the criminal justice system with discriminatory policing and inequitable trial and sentencing practices. To make matters worse, once they’re released from prison, ex-convicts face lifelong disadvantages in employment, housing, and social standing—all of which lead to higher chances of criminal recidivism. Meanwhile, Alexander points out that like slavery and Jim Crow before it, the contemporary prison system has a number of economic incentives to continue its racist practices.)
One result of these racist political strategies was a new strand of assimilationist logic that blamed racial disparities on supposedly “pathological” Black families, communities, and culture. Kendi traces this idea to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Assistant Secretary of Labor who in 1965 authored a report describing the Black family as a “tangle of pathology.” Kendi explains that the Moynihan Report suggested that Black men, emasculated first by slavery and then by discrimination, were too weak to lead their households or communities. Meanwhile, Kendi says, the report stereotyped Black women as promiscuous and irresponsible.
Combining these two ideas, the theory of pathological Black families suggested that Black people were incapable of healthy and functional family lives (which in turn explained the poverty and supposedly rampant crime in Black communities). Kendi points out that even as this theory ostensibly points to racism as the underlying cause of Black pathologies, it nonetheless claims that Black people are, in fact, defective.
And yet, Kendi says, like other assimilationist ideas before it, this theory was adopted by racist White people and Black people alike. He argues that throughout the 1980s and 1990s, some conservative politicians blamed Black people for a lack of “personal responsibility,” suggesting that if they just stopped behaving badly, their problems would go away. Meanwhile, Kendi says, many Black leaders began to fret about cultural trends like “Gangsta rap,” which they feared would hurt White opinions of Black people while setting dangerous examples for Black youths.
Why the Myth of Black Pathology Is So Damaging
These popular narratives about the flaws in Black families and communities produce a mix of damaging ideas that go beyond just reproducing the notion of Black inferiority. For example:
Blaming single-parent homes obscures many of the racist obstacles Black people face. For example, some commentators criticize the statistics that suggest that single-family homes are bad for kids, pointing out that these statistics take into account neither the discriminatory factors that produce single-parent Black homes in the first place nor the host of racial disparities that make it harder for Black people from any background to match the achievements of their White peers.
Pathologizing Black families and communities perpetuates segregation and leads to deadly consequences for these communities. In Biased, Jennifer Eberhardt points out that the more Black people live in a community, the more likely people (both Black and White) are to view that community as dangerous, disorderly, and so on. And because the myth of personal responsibility suggests that Black people choose these supposedly dangerous lifestyles, these communities are targeted by practices such as redlining (denying important services like mortgages, insurance, or grocery stores) and discriminatory policing (including the use of deadly force).
Kendi argues that as the post-Civil Rights era settled in, one final myth emerged—the idea that racism is over. Kendi explains that as Black people gained legal protections and society moved away from open racism and discrimination, leaders started talking about a “color-blind” or “postracial” society. The idea of color-blindness seems appealing—it implies that nobody notices or cares about racial differences, which in turn suggests that racism is no longer an issue. But Kendi points out that not seeing race means not seeing the racial disparities that exist because of racism. He concludes that color-blindness and postracialism are inherently racist concepts because they obscure racist policies and their effects.
Moreover, he points out that postracialism undermines antiracist positions by delegitimizing any accusations of racism. As Kendi explains, postracial logic says that people who criticize racist policies or behaviors are themselves racist because they’re insisting on racial differences even though race isn’t an issue anymore. Kendi suggests that this is a new way of accusing someone of “playing the race card”—that is, exploiting their status as a racial minority as a political tool.
How the Idea of Postracialism Evolved—and Why It’s Wrong
In an article called “Our New Postracial Myth,” Kendi explains in more detail how the idea of postracialism arose during Obama’s first Presidential campaign and how it gradually evolved into a justification for racism.
Kendi says that with Obama’s early successes in his 2008 campaign, the media mistook his and his supporters’ calls for change as evidence that change had already happened. In other words, Kendi said, Obama’s success was taken as evidence that race no longer mattered to US voters. By the time Obama was elected President, the media was declaring that anti-Black racism was over.
Whereas this idea began as a misguidedly optimistic narrative of racial progress, Kendi suggests that it transformed into an excuse to ignore racial inequities and undermine antiracist activists. The logic is that because America is now postracial, people who call out racial injustice are themselves racist. Kendi argues that both versions of the postracial narrative are appealing in part because average White people don’t want to see themselves as racist, and postracialism reassures us as a society that we’re not.
Yet as Robin DiAngelo argues in White Fragility, racism isn’t just about individual people’s views or actions—it’s about systemic discrimination that causes systemic inequities. In other words, we can judge whether a society is racist by looking at its outcomes—and in the US, the outcomes reveal inequity that is, if anything, getting worse. For example, numerous studies conducted during and after Obama’s administration (that is, during the supposedly postracial period) have found that racial income and wealth gaps have been growing wider in recent years.
One factor has improved, though: Americans’ perceptions of racial equality. One study found that the average American estimates that from 1963 to 2016, Black families went from having half the wealth that White families had to having 90% of the wealth. The reality: In both 1963 and 2016, Black families had only 10% of the wealth that White families had. This discrepancy between our perception of racial equity and the reality of racial inequity might be part of why it’s so easy to underestimate racism’s impact.
After laying out his history of American racism, Kendi ends with some thoughts on how to eliminate (or at least minimize) racial disparities in society. He argues that we can never truly eliminate racism because there will always be people willing to advance themselves with racist policies and to invent racist ideas to justify these policies. And as we’ve seen, strategies like education and uplift do nothing to stop those policies or the ideas that spring from them.
Instead, Kendi argues, the solution is to defeat racist policies themselves—and keep them from coming back. To do so will require antiracists to achieve political power, enact antiracist policies, and hold on to their power (and policies) long enough for antiracist thought to become the new public common sense. At that point, Kendi says, the general populace will need to hold the government responsible for maintaining the newly antiracist society.
How to Be an Antiracist Society
Because Stamped from the Beginning is a history book, Kendi only sketches out a political plan and doesn’t go into much depth about how to defeat racist policies. However, in his second book, How to Be an Antiracist, he lays out a more detailed plan:
1) Figure out which policies are causing inequity and think of antiracist policies to replace them.
2) Determine who has the power to put antiracist policies into effect.
3) Educate the public about the racist policies and your proposed antiracist replacements. Persuade policymakers to adopt your proposed changes.
4) If that doesn’t work, use demonstrations and protests to move the public to action.
5) Make sure the new policies lead to more equitable outcomes. If they don’t, find new policies.
Kendi, a cancer survivor, likens racism to societal cancer. He argues that like cancer, racism eventually spreads to take over all of a society’s vital systems. If left unchecked, he says, racism will kill society as surely as cancer will kill a person. On the other hand, if we’re willing to acknowledge and fight racism, he says that antiracist policies work like chemotherapy, shrinking the racist “tumor” until it’s small enough for us to surgically remove any remaining racist policies. At that point, as with cancer, we should watch for the first signs that racism is returning, so that we can deal with it before it spreads and causes more harm.
Kendi argues that racist ideas exist to prop up racist policies. Let’s see how that principle helps explain a racist idea you’ve encountered.
Describe a racist idea that has affected you in some way. It may have caused you harm, it may be an idea that you’ve believed at some point, or it may be an idea that you’ve seen other people expressing.
What racist policy (or policies) does this idea justify?
Who benefits from this racist policy and how?
Describe one or more antiracist policies that could replace the racist policy you identified.