Blackmores conceive well gold woolworths

Stamped From The Beginning

X. Kendi is an assistant professor of African American history at the Univer-

sity of Florida and the author of the award-winning

book The Black Campus Movement: Black Students

and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education,

1965–1972. A frequent public speaker and writer of

commentaries, Kendi lives in Gainesville, Florida.

— Follow Ibram on Twitter @DrIbram or visit

Ibram.org for more information.

Available as an e-book

NAtIoN BooKs A Member of the Perseus Books Group www.nationbooks.org

Americans like to insist that we are living in a postracial, color-blind society. In fact,

racist thought is alive and well; it has simply become

more sophisticated and more insidious. And as

award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in

Stamped from the Beginning, racist ideas in this coun-

try have a long and lingering history, one in which

nearly every great American thinker is complicit.

In this deeply researched and fast-moving narra-

tive, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black

racist ideas and their staggering power over the

course of American history. Stamped from the Begin-

ning uses the lives of five major American intellectu-

als to offer a window into the contentious debates

between assimilationists and segregationists and

between racists and antiracists. From Puritan min-

ister Cotton Mather to Thomas Jefferson, from fiery

abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to brilliant

scholar W. E. B. Du Bois to legendary anti-prison

activist Angela Davis, Kendi shows how and why

some of our leading proslavery and pro–civil rights

thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist

ideas in America.

As Kendi provocatively illustrates, racist think-

ing did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Racist

ideas were created and popularized in an effort to

defend deeply entrenched discriminatory policies

and to rationalize the nation’s racial inequities in

everything from wealth to health. While racist ideas

are easily produced and easily consumed, they can

also be discredited. In shedding much-needed light

on the murky history of racist ideas, Stamped from

the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose

them—and in the process, gives us reason to hope.

Stamped from the Beginning

Ibram X. Kendi

H i s t o r y / A f r i c A n A m e r i c A n s t u d i e s

Pr Aise for Stamped from the Beginning “ An accomplished history of racist thought and practice. . . . Racism is the enduring scar on the American consciousness. In this ambitious, magisterial book, Kendi reveals just how deep that scar cuts and why it endures, its barely subcutaneous pain still able to flare.”

—K i r k u s , starred review

“ In his ambitious, illuminating, and engaging book, Ibram X. Kendi seamlessly assembles sources from Cotton Mather to Angela Davis, the Great Awakening to Black Lives Matter, the Birth of a Nation to Hip Hop culture, to show how not only race but racist ideas are at the center of American thought.” — Pau l a J . G i d d i n g s , e. A. Woodson Professor, smith college, and author of Ida: A Sword Among Lions,

Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching

“ Stamped from the Beginning is a tour de force of intellectual history that brilliantly illu- minates the tragic history of racist ideas from slavery to Black Lives Matter.”

— Pe n i e l J o s e ph , author of Stokely and Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour

“ Stamped from the Beginning is a history of how racist ideas are built, and how they are built to last. Understanding this history is essential if we want to have any hope of prog- ress. This book will forever change the way we think about race.”

— T o u ré , author of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness

“ Richly sourced and engaging, Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning is a highly accessible yet provocative study that seeks to complicate our understanding of racist ideas and the forces that produce them.” — Y oh u r u W i l l i a m s, professor of history and

dean of the college of Arts and sciences, fairfield university

“ Both a penetrating treatise and a wonderfully accessible work of intellectual history, Stamped from the Beginning reveals the heritage of ideas behind the modern dialectic of race-denial and race-obsession. This book has done the cause of anti-racism a great service.”

— R u s s e l l R i c k f o r d, author of We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination

$32.99/$42.99 CAN

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J AC K e t d e s I G N By t h e B o o K d e s I G N e r s J AC K e t A r t © s hu t t e r s to C K

The Def initive History of Racist Ideas in America

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4-color process, CMYK Coarse Matte UV on 100# paper

STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING

STAMPED FROM

THE BEGINNING

The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

Ibram X. Kendi

New York

Copyright © 2016 by Ibram X. Kendi Published by Nation Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group 116 East 16th Street, 8th Floor New York, NY 10003

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kendi, Ibram X., author. Title: Stamped from the beginning : the definitive history of racist ideas in America / Ibram X. Kendi. Description: New York : Nation Books, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015033671| ISBN 9781568584638 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781568584645 (ebook : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Racism—United States—History. | United States—Race relations. Classification: LCC E185.61 .K358 2016 | DDC 305.800973—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015033671

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the lives they said don’t matter

vii

Contents

Prologue 1

PART I COTTON MATHER

1. Human Hierarchy 15 2. Origins of Racist Ideas 22 3. Coming to America 31 4. Saving Souls, Not Bodies 47 5. Black Hunts 58 6. Great Awakening 66

PART II THOMAS JEFFERSON

7. Enlightenment 79 8. Black Exhibits 92 9. Created Equal 104 10. Uplift Suasion 120 11. Big Bottoms 135 12. Colonization 143

PART III WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

13. Gradual Equality 161 14. Imbruted or Civilized 177 15. Soul 191 16. The Impending Crisis 202 17. History’s Emancipator 214 18. Ready for Freedom? 223 19. Reconstructing Slavery 235 20. Reconstructing Blame 248

viii Contents

PART IV W. E. B. DU BOIS

21. Renewing the South 263 22. Southern Horrors 269 23. Black Judases 280 24. Great White Hopes 295 25. The Birth of a Nation 308 26. Media Suasion 323 27. Old Deal 335 28. Freedom Brand 349 29. Massive Resistance 365

PART V ANGELA DAVIS

30. The Act of Civil Rights 381 31. Black Power 393 32. Law and Order 410 33. Reagan’s Drugs 424 34. New Democrats 440 35. New Republicans 456 36. 99.9 Percent the Same 469 37. The Extraordinary Negro 482

Epilogue 497

Acknowledgments 513 Notes 516 Index 562

1

Prologue

EVERY HISTORIAN WRITES IN—and is impacted by—a precise historical moment. My moment, this book’s moment, coincides with the tele- vised and untelevised killings of unarmed human beings at the hands of law enforcement officials, and with the televised and untelevised life of the shooting star of #Black Lives Matter during America’s stormi- est nights. I somehow managed to write this book between the heart- breaks of Trayvon Martin and Rekia Boyd and Michael Brown and Freddie Gray and the Charleston 9 and Sandra Bland, heartbreaks that are a product of America’s history of racist ideas as much as this his- tory book of racist ideas is a product of these heartbreaks.

Young Black males were twenty-one times more likely to be killed by police than their White counterparts between 2010 and 2012, accord- ing to federal statistics. The under-recorded, under-analyzed racial disparities between female victims of lethal police force may be even greater. Federal data show that the median wealth of White households is a staggering thirteen times the median wealth of Black households—and Black people are five times more likely to be incarcerated than Whites.1

But these statistics should come as no surprise. Most Ameri- cans are probably aware of these racial disparities in police killings, in wealth, in prisons—in nearly every sector of US society. By racial disparities, I mean how racial groups are not statistically represented according to their populations. If Black people make up 13.2 percent of the US population, then Black people should make up somewhere close to 13 percent of the Americans killed by the police, somewhere close to 13 percent of the Americans sitting in prisons, somewhere

2 stamped from the Beginning

close to owning 13 percent of US wealth. But today, the United States remains nowhere close to racial parity. African Americans own 2.7 percent of the nation’s wealth, and make up 40 percent of the incarcer- ated population. These are racial disparities, and racial disparities are older than the life of the United States.2

In 2016, the United States is celebrating its 240th birthday. But even before Thomas Jefferson and the other founders declared inde- pendence, Americans were engaging in a polarizing debate over racial disparities, over why they exist and persist, and over why White Americans as a group were prospering more than Black Americans as a group. Historically, there have been three sides to this heated argument. A group we can call segregationists has blamed Black people themselves for the racial disparities. A group we can call antiracists has pointed to racial discrimination. A group we can call assimilationists has tried to argue for both, saying that Black people and racial discrimina- tion were to blame for racial disparities. During the ongoing debate over police killings, these three sides to the argument have been on full display. Segregationists have been blaming the recklessly crimi- nal behavior of the Black people who were killed by police officers. Michael Brown was a monstrous, threatening thief; therefore Darren Wilson had reason to fear him and to kill him. Antiracists have been blaming the recklessly racist behavior of the police. The life of this dark-skinned eighteen-year-old did not matter to Darren Wilson. Assimilationists have tried to have it both ways. Both Wilson and Brown acted like irresponsible criminals.

Listening to this three-way argument in recent years has been like listening to the three distinct arguments you will hear through- out Stamped from the Beginning. For nearly six centuries, antiracist ideas have been pitted against two kinds of racist ideas: segregationist and assimilationist. The history of racist ideas that follows is the history of these three distinct voices—segregationists, assimilationists, and anti- racists—and how they each have rationalized racial disparities, argu- ing why Whites have remained on the living and winning end, while Blacks remained on the losing and dying end.

prologue 3

THE TITLE STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING comes from a speech that Mis- sissippi senator Jefferson Davis gave on the floor of the US Senate on April 12, 1860. This future president of the Confederacy objected to a bill funding Black education in Washington, DC. “This Govern- ment was not founded by negroes nor for negroes,” but “by white men for white men,” Davis lectured his colleagues. The bill was based on the false notion of racial equality, he declared. The “inequality of the white and black races” was “stamped from the beginning.”3

It may not be surprising that Jefferson Davis regarded Black people as biologically distinct and inferior to White people—and Black skin as an ugly stamp on the beautiful White canvas of normal human skin—and this Black stamp as a signifier of the Negro’s everlasting inferiority. This kind of segregationist thinking is perhaps easier to identify—and easier to condemn—as obviously racist. And yet so many prominent Americans, many of whom we celebrate for their pro- gressive ideas and activism, many of whom had very good intentions, subscribed to assimilationist thinking that also served up racist beliefs about Black inferiority. We have remembered assimilationists’ glori- ous struggle against racial discrimination, and tucked away their inglo- rious partial blaming of inferior Black behavior for racial disparities. In embracing biological racial equality, assimilationists point to envi- ronment—hot climates, discrimination, culture, and poverty—as the creators of inferior Black behaviors. For solutions, they maintain that the ugly Black stamp can be erased—that inferior Black behaviors can be developed, given the proper environment. As such, assimilationists constantly encourage Black adoption of White cultural traits and/or physical ideals. In his landmark 1944 study of race relations, a study widely regarded as one of the instigators of the civil rights movement, Swedish economist and Nobel Laureate Gunnar Myrdal wrote, “It is to the advantage of American Negroes as individuals and as a group to become assimilated into American culture, to acquire the traits held in esteem by the dominant white Americans.” He had also claimed, in An American Dilemma, that “in practically all its divergences, American Negro culture is . . . a distorted development, or a pathological condi- tion, of the general American culture.”4

4 stamped from the Beginning

But there is, and has always been, a persistent line of antiracist thought in this country, challenging those assimilationist and segre- gationist lines, and giving the line of truth hope. Antiracists have long argued that racial discrimination was stamped from the beginning of America, which explains why racial disparities have existed and per- sisted. Unlike segregationists and assimilationists, antiracists have rec- ognized that the different skin colors, hair textures, behaviors, and cultural ways of Blacks and Whites are on the same level, are equal in all their divergences. As the legendary Black lesbian poet Audre Lorde lectured in 1980: “We have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals.”5

THERE WAS NOTHING simple or straightforward or predictable about racist ideas, and thus their history. Frankly speaking, for generations of Americans, racist ideas have been their common sense. The simple logic of racist ideas has manipulated millions over the years, muffling the more complex antiracist reality again and again. And so, this his- tory could not be made for readers in an easy-to-predict narrative of absurd racists clashing with reasonable antiracists. This history could not be made for readers in an easy-to-predict, two-sided Hollywood battle of obvious good versus obvious evil, with good triumphing in the end. From the beginning, it has been a three-sided battle, a bat- tle of antiracist ideas being pitted against two kinds of racist ideas at the same time, with evil and good failing and triumphing in the end. Both segregationist and assimilationist ideas have been wrapped up in attractive arguments to seem good, and both have made sure to re-wrap antiracist ideas as evil. And in wrapping their ideas in good- ness, segregationists and assimilationists have rarely confessed to their racist public policies and ideas. But why would they? Racists con- fessing to their crimes is not in their self-interest. It has been smarter and more exonerating to identify what they did and said as not rac- ist. Criminals hardly ever acknowledge their crimes against human- ity. And the shrewdest and most powerful anti-Black criminals have legalized their criminal activities, have managed to define their crimes

prologue 5

of slave trading and enslaving and discriminating and killing outside of the criminal code. Likewise, the shrewdest and most powerful rac- ist ideologues have managed to define their ideas outside of racism. Actually, assimilationists first used and defined and popularized the term “racism” during the 1940s. All the while, they refused to define their own assimilationist ideas of Black behavioral inferiority as racist. These assimilationists defined only segregationist ideas of Black biolog- ical inferiority as racist. And segregationists, too, have always resisted the label of “racist.” They have claimed instead that they were merely articulating God’s word, nature’s design, science’s plan, or plain old common sense.6

All these self-serving efforts by powerful factions to define their racist rhetoric as nonracist has left Americans thoroughly divided over, and ignorant of, what racist ideas truly are. It has all allowed Americans who think something is wrong with Black people to believe, somehow, that they are not racists. But to say something is wrong with a group is to say something is inferior about that group. These sayings are inter- locked logically whether Americans realize it or not, whether Ameri- cans are willing to admit it or not. Any comprehensive history of racist ideas must grapple with the ongoing manipulation and confusion, must set the record straight on those who are espousing racist ideas and those who are not. My definition of a racist idea is a simple one: it is any concept that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group in any way. I define anti-Black racist ideas—the subject of this book—as any idea suggesting that Black people, or any group of Black people, are inferior in any way to another racial group.

Like the other identifiable races, Black people are in reality a col- lection of groups differentiated by gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, culture, skin color, profession, and nationality—among a series of other identifiers, including biracial people who may or may not identify as Black. Each and every identifiable Black group has been subjected to what critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw has called “intersection- ality”—prejudice stemming from the intersections of racist ideas and other forms of bigotry, such as sexism, classism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia. For example, sexist notions of real women as weak, and

6 stamped from the Beginning

racist notions of Black women as not really women, have intersected to produce the gender racism of the strong Black woman, inferior to the pinnacle of womanhood, the weak White woman. In other words, to call women as a group stupid is sexism. To call Black people as a group stupid is racism. To call Black women as a group stupid is gender rac- ism. Such intersections have also led to articulations of class racism (demeaning the Black poor and Black elites), queer racism (demeaning Black lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people), and ethnic rac- ism (concocting a hierarchy of Black ethnic groups), to name a few. Sweeping histories of racist ideas have traditionally focused on racism toward Black people in general, neglecting intersecting conceptions of specific Black groups—or even of Black spaces, such as Black neigh- borhoods, Black schools, Black businesses, and Black churches. Stamped from the Beginning focuses its narration on both—on the general as well as specific forms of assimilationist and segregationist ideas.7

STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING narrates the entire history of racist ideas, from their origins in fifteenth-century Europe, through colonial times when the early British settlers carried racist ideas to America, all the way to the twenty-first century and current debates about the events taking place on our streets. Five main characters, in particular, will serve as our tour guides as we explore the landscape of racial ideas through five periods in American history. During America’s first century, racist theological ideas were absolutely critical to sanctioning the growth of American slavery and making it acceptable to the Christian churches. These ideas were featured in the sermons of early America’s greatest preacher and intellectual, Boston divine Cotton Mather (1663–1728), our first tour guide. Cotton Mather was the namesake and grandson of two of New England’s intellectual trailblazers, John Cotton and Rich- ard Mather, Puritan preachers who helped carry two-hundred-year-old racist ideas from Europe across the Atlantic Ocean. To substantiate American slavery and win converts, Cotton Mather preached racial inequality in body while insisting that the dark souls of enslaved Afri- cans would become White when they became Christians. His writings

prologue 7

and sermons were widely read in the colonies and in Europe, where the progenitors of the scientific revolution—and then the Enlight- enment—were racializing and whitening Europeans, freedom, civili- zation, rationality, and beauty. During the American Revolution and thereafter, years that saw the stunning growth of American slavery, politicians and secular intellectuals alike joined slavery’s justifying fray. These justifiers included one of the most powerful politicians and sec- ular intellectuals of the new United States—our second tour guide, the antislavery, anti-abolitionist Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826).

Jefferson died on the eve of the nineteenth century’s movement for emancipation and civil rights, a movement partially spearheaded by the pulsating editor of The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), tour guide number three. Like his peers, Garrison’s most instrumen- tally passionate antislavery ideas drawing Americans to the cause of abolition and civil rights were usually not antiracist ideas. He popular- ized the assimilationist idea that slavery—or racial discrimination more broadly—had “imbruted” Black people; this oppression had made their cultures, psychologies, and behaviors inferior. It is one antiracist thing to say discriminators treated Black people like they were barbarians. It is yet another racist thing to say the discrimination actually trans- formed Black people into barbarians. The nation’s first great profes- sionally trained Black scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), our fourth tour guide, initially adopted Garrison’s racist idea. But he also stood at the forefront of antiracist ideas, challenging Jim Crow’s rise in the late nineteenth century. Over the course of his long and storied career into the twentieth century, Du Bois’s double-consciousness of racist and antiracist ideas amazingly transfigured into a single consciousness of antiracism. In the process, however, his influence waned. In the 1950s and 1960s, racist arguments once again became the most influential ideas drawing Americans to the cause of civil rights. Later, civil rights and Black power advances—and the sensationalized “crises” of Black single- parent households, welfare “queens,” affirmative action, and violent rebels and criminals—all fed a ravishing racist backlash to the racial progress of the 1960s, including the judicial persecution of anti- racist activists, most famously a young philosopher from the University

8 stamped from the Beginning

of California at Los Angeles. Exonerated of all capital charges in 1972, Angela Davis (1943–present) spent the next four decades opposing the racial discriminators who learned to hide their intent, denouncing those who promoted end-of-racism fairytales while advocating biparti- san tough-on-crime policies and a prison-industrial complex that engi- neered the mass incarceration, beatings, and killings of Black people by law enforcement. She will be our fifth and final tour guide.

These five main characters—Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis—were arguably the most consistently prominent or provocative racial the- orists of their respective lifetimes, writing and speaking and teaching racial (and nonracial) ideas that were as fascinating as they were orig- inal, influential, and/or contradictory. But Stamped from the Beginning is not a set of five biographies of these people. Their complex lives and influential ideas have sat at the apex of debates between assimilation- ists and segregationists, or between racists and antiracists, and thus provide a window to those debates, to this intricately woven history.

STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING is not merely a history of overt racism becoming covert; nor is it a history of racial progress, or a history of ignorance and hate. Stamped from the Beginning rewrites the history of rac- ist ideas by exposing the incompleteness of these three widely believed historical storylines. Racist intentions—not policies—became covert after the 1960s. Old and new racist policies remained as overt as ever, and we can see the effects of these policies whenever we see racial dis- parities in everything from wealth to health in the twenty-first century. That’s not to say that antiracist reformers have not made progress in exposing and burying racist policies over the years. But racist reform- ers have made progress, too. The outlawing of chattel slavery in 1865 brought on racial progress. Then, the legalization of Jim Crow brought on the progression of racist policies in the late nineteenth century. The outlawing of Jim Crow in 1964 brought on racial progress. Then, the legalization of superficially unintentional discrimination brought on the progression of racist policies in the late twentieth century.

prologue 9

In order to fully explain the complex history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning must chronicle this racial progress and the simultaneous progression of racist policies. Hate and ignorance have not driven the history of racist ideas in America. Racist policies have driven the his- tory of racist ideas in America. And this fact becomes apparent when we examine the causes behind, not the consumption of racist ideas, but the production of racist ideas. What caused US senator John C. Cal- houn of South Carolina in 1837 to produce the racist idea of slavery as a “positive good,” when he knew slavery’s torturous horrors? What caused Atlanta newspaper editor Henry W. Grady in 1885 to produce the racist idea of “separate but equal,” when he knew southern communities were hardly separate or equal? What caused think tankers after the presiden- tial election of Barack Obama in 2008 to produce the racist idea of a postracial society, when they knew all those studies had documented discrimination? Time and again, racist ideas have not been cooked up from the boiling pot of ignorance and hate. Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to jus- tify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era’s racial disparities away from those policies and onto Black people.

I was taught the popular folktale of racism: that ignorant and hateful people had produced racist ideas, and that these racist people had instituted racist policies. But when I learned the motives behind the production of many of America’s most influentially racist ideas, it became quite obvious that this folktale, though sensible, was not based on a firm footing of historical evidence. Ignorance/hate racist ideas discrimination: this causal relationship is largely ahistorical. It has actually been the inverse relationship—racial discrimination led to racist ideas which led to ignorance and hate. Racial discrimination

racist ideas ignorance/hate: this is the causal relationship driving America’s history of race relations.

Their own racist ideas usually did not dictate the decisions of the most powerful Americans when they instituted, defended, and toler- ated discriminatory policies that affected millions of Black lives over the course of American history. Racially discriminatory policies have usually sprung from economic, political, and cultural self-interests,

10 stamped from the Beginning

self-interests that are constantly changing. Politicians seeking higher office have primarily created and defended discriminatory policies out of political self-interest—not racist ideas. Capitalists seeking to increase profit margins have primarily created and defended discrimi- natory policies out of economic self-interest—not racist ideas. Cultural professionals, including theologians, artists, scholars, and journalists, were seeking to advance their careers or cultures and have primar- ily created and defended discriminatory policies out of professional self-interest—not racist ideas.

When we look back on our history, we often wonder why so many Americans did not resist slave trading, enslaving, segregating, or now, mass incarcerating. The reason is, again, racist ideas. The principal function of racist ideas in American history has been the suppression of resistance to racial discrimination and its resulting racial disparities. The beneficiaries of slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration have produced racist ideas of Black people being best suited for or deserv- ing of the confines of slavery, segregation, or the jail cell. Consumers of these racist ideas have been led to believe there is something wrong with Black people, and not the policies that have enslaved, oppressed, and confined so many Black people.

Racist ideas have done their job on us. We have a hard time rec- ognizing that racial discrimination is the sole cause of racial disparities in this country and in the world at large. I write we for a reason. When I began this book, with a heavy heart for Trayvon Martin and Rekia Boyd, I must confess that I held quite a few racist ideas. Even though I am an Africana studies historian and have been tutored all my life in egalitarian spaces, I held racist notions of Black inferiority before researching and writing this book. Racist ideas are ideas. Anyone can produce them or consume them, as Stamped from the Beginning’s interracial cast of producers and consumers show. Anyone—Whites, Latina/os, Blacks, Asians, Native Americans—anyone can express the idea that Black people are inferior, that something is wrong with Black people. Anyone can believe both racist and antiracist ideas, that certain things are wrong with Black people and other things are equal. Fooled by racist ideas, I did not fully realize that the only thing wrong with Black

prologue 11

people is that we think something is wrong with Black people. I did not fully realize that the only thing extraordinary about White people is that they think something is extraordinary about White people.

I am not saying all individuals who happen to identify as Black (or White or Latina/o or Asian or Native American) are equal in all ways. I am saying that there is nothing wrong with Black people as a group, or with any other racial group. That is what it truly means to think as an antiracist: to think there is nothing wrong with Black people, to think that racial groups are equal. There are lazy and unwise and harmful individuals of African ancestry. There are lazy and unwise and harm- ful individuals of European ancestry. There are industrious and wise and harmless individuals of European ancestry. There are industrious and wise and harmless individuals of African ancestry. But no racial group has ever had a monopoly on any type of human trait or gene— not now, not ever. Under our different-looking hair and skin, doctors cannot tell the difference between our bodies, our brains, or the blood that runs in our veins. All cultures, in all their behavioral differences, are on the same level. Black Americans’ history of oppression has made Black opportunities—not Black people—inferior.

When you truly believe that the racial groups are equal, then you also believe that racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimi- nation. Committed to this antiracist idea of group equality, I was able to self-critique, discover, and shed the racist ideas I had consumed over my lifetime while I uncovered and exposed the racist ideas that others have produced over the lifetime of America. I know that read- ers truly committed to racial equality will join me on this journey of interrogating and shedding our racist ideas. But if there is anything I have learned during my research, it’s that the principal producers and defenders of racist ideas will not join us. And no logic or fact or his- tory book can change them, because logic and facts and scholarship have little to do with why they are expressing racist ideas in the first place. Stamped from the Beginning is about these closed-minded, cunning, captivating producers of racist ideas. But it is not for them.

My open mind was liberated in writing this story. I am hoping that other open minds can be liberated in reading this story.

PART I

Cotton Mather

15

CHAPTER 1

Human Hierarchy

THEY WEATHERED BRUTAL WINTERS, suffered diseases, and learned to cope with the resisting Native Americans. But nothing brought more destruc- tion to Puritan settlements than the Great Hurricane of 1635. On August 16, 1635, the hurricane—today judged to be perhaps Category 3—thundered up the Atlantic Coast, brushing Jamestown and passing over eastern Long Island. The storm’s eye glanced at Providence to the east and moved inland, snatching up thousands of trees like weeds. In the seven-year-old Massachusetts Bay Colony, the hurricane smashed down English homes as if they were ants, before reaching the Atlantic Ocean and swinging knockout waves onto the New England shores.

Large ships from England transporting settlers and supplies were sitting ducks. Seamen anchored one ship, the James, off the coast of New Hampshire to wait out the hurricane. Suddenly, a powerful wave sliced the ship’s anchors and cables like an invisible knife. Sea- men slashed the third cable in distress and hoisted sail to cruise back out to a safer sea. The winds smashed the new sail into “rotten rags,” recorded notable Puritan minister Richard Mather in his diary. As the rags disappeared into the ocean, so did hope.

Abducted now by the hurricane, the ship headed toward a mighty rock. All seemed lost. Richard Mather and fellow passengers cried out to the Lord for deliverance. Using “his own immediate good hand,” God guided the ship around the mighty rock, Mather later testified. The sea calmed. The crew hurriedly rigged the ship with new sails. The Lord blew “a fresh gale of wind,” allowing the captain to navigate

16 stamped from the Beginning

away from danger. The battered James arrived in Boston on August 17, 1635. All one hundred passengers credited God for their survival. Richard Mather took the deliverance as a charge “to walk uprightly before him as long as we live.”1

As a Puritan minister, Richard Mather had walked uprightly through fifteen years of British persecution before embarking on the perilous journey across the Atlantic to begin life anew in New England. There, he would be reunited with his illustrious ministerial friend John Cotton, who had faced British persecution for twenty years in Boston, England. In 1630, Cotton had given the farewell sermon to hundreds of Puritan founders of New England communities, blessing their ful- fillment of God’s prophetic vision. As dissenters from the Church of England, Puritans believed themselves to be God’s chosen piece of humanity, a special, superior people, and New England, their Israel, was to be their exceptional land.2

Within a week of the Great Hurricane, Richard Mather was installed as pastor of Dorchester’s North Church near the renowned North Church of the new Boston, which was pastored by John Cot- ton. Mather and Cotton then embarked on a sacred mission to create, articulate, and defend the New England Way. They used their pens as much as their pulpits, and they used their power as much as their pens and pulpits. They penned the colonies’ first adult and children’s books as part of this endeavor. Mather, in all likelihood, steered the selection of Henry Dunster to lead colonial America’s first college, Harvard’s forerunner, in 1640. And Cotton did not mind when Dunster fash- ioned Harvard’s curriculum after their alma mater, Cambridge, setting off an ideological trend. Like the founders of Cambridge and Harvard before them, the founders of William & Mary (1693), Yale (1701), the University of Pennsylvania (1740), Princeton (1746), Columbia (1754), Brown (1764), Rutgers (1766), and Dartmouth (1769)—the other eight colonial colleges—regarded ancient Greek and Latin literature as uni- versal truths worthy of memorization and unworthy of critique. At the center of the Old and New England Greek library hailed the resur- rected Aristotle, who had come under suspicion as a threat to doctrine among some factions in Christianity during the medieval period.3

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In studying Aristotle’s philosophy, Puritans learned rationales for human hierarchy, and they began to believe that some groups were superior to other groups. In Aristotle’s case, ancient Greeks were supe- rior to all non-Greeks. But Puritans believed they were superior to Native Americans, the African people, and even Anglicans—that is, all non-Puritans. Aristotle, who lived from 384 to 322 BCE, concocted a climate theory to justify Greek superiority, saying that extreme hot or cold climates produced intellectually, physically, and morally infe- rior people who were ugly and lacked the capacity for freedom and self-government. Aristotle labeled Africans “burnt faces”—the original meaning in Greek of “Ethiopian”—and viewed the “ugly” extremes of pale or dark skins as the effect of the extreme cold or hot climates. All of this was in the interest of normalizing Greek slaveholding practices and Greece’s rule over the western Mediterranean. Aristotle situated the Greeks, in their supreme, intermediate climate, as the most beau- tifully endowed superior rulers and enslavers of the world. “Humanity is divided into two: the masters and the slaves; or, if one prefers it, the Greeks and the Barbarians, those who have the right to command; and those who are born to obey,” Aristotle said. For him, the enslaved peoples were “by nature incapable of reasoning and live a life of pure sensation, like certain tribes on the borders of the civilized world, or like people who are diseased through the onset of illnesses like epi- lepsy or madness.”4

By the birth of Christ or the start of the Common Era, Romans were justifying their slaveholding practices using Aristotle’s climate theory, and soon the new Christianity began to contribute to these arguments. For early Christian theologians—whom Puritans studied alongside Aristotle—God ordained the human hierarchy. St. Paul introduced, in the first century, a three-tiered hierarchy of slave relations— heavenly master (top), earthly master (middle), enslaved (bottom). “He who was free when called is a slave of Christ,” he testified in 1 Corinthians. “Slaves” were to “obey in everything those that are your earthly mas- ters, not with eyeservice as men-pleasers, but in singleness of heart, fearing the Lord.” In a crucial caveat in Galatians 3:28, St. Paul equal- ized the souls of masters and slaves as “all one in Christ Jesus.”

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All in all, ethnic and religious and color prejudice existed in the ancient world. Constructions of races—White Europe, Black Africa, for instance—did not, and therefore racist ideas did not. But cru- cially, the foundations of race and racist ideas were laid. And so were the foundations for egalitarianism, antiracism, and antislavery laid in Greco- Roman antiquity. “The deity gave liberty to all men, and nature created no one a slave,” wrote Alkidamas, Aristotle’s rival in Athens. When Herodotus, the foremost historian of ancient Greece, traveled up the Nile River, he found the Nubians “the most handsome of peoples.” Lactantius, an adviser to Constantine I, the first Christian Roman emperor, announced early in the fourth century: “God who creates and inspires men wished them all to be fair, that is, equal.” St. Augustine, an African church father in the fourth and fifth centuries, maintained that “whoever is born anywhere as a human being, that is, as a rational mortal creature, however strange he may appear to our senses in bodily form or colour or motion or utterance, or in any fac- ulty, part or quality of his nature whatsoever, let no true believer have any doubt that such an individual is descended from the one man who was first created.” However, these antislavery and egalitarian champi- ons did not accompany Aristotle and St. Paul into the modern era, into the new Harvard curriculum, or into the New England mind seeking to justify slavery and the racial hierarchy it produced.5

When John Cotton drafted New England’s first constitution in 1636, Moses his judicials, he legalized the enslavement of captives taken in just wars as well as “such strangers as willingly selle themselves or are sold to us.” The New England way imitated the Old England way on slavery. Cotton reproduced the policies of his British peers close and far away. In 1636, Barbados officials announced that “Negroes and Indians that come here to be sold, should serve for Life, unless a Con- tract was before made to the contrary.”6

The Pequot War, the first major war between the New England colonists and the area’s indigenous peoples, erupted in 1637. Captain William Pierce forced some indigenous war captives onto the Desire, the first slaver to leave British North America. The ship sailed to the Isla de Providencia off Nicaragua, where “Negroes” were reportedly

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“being . . . kept as perpetuall servants.” Massachusetts governor John Winthrop recorded Captain Pierce’s historic arrival back into Boston in 1638, noting that his ship was hauling “salt, cotton, tobacco and Negroes.”7

The first generation of Puritans began rationalizing the enslave- ment of these “Negroes” without skipping a Christian beat. Their chilling nightmares of persecution were not the only hallucinations the Puritans had carried over the Atlantic waters in their minds to America. From the first ships that landed in Virginia in 1607, to the ships that survived the Great Hurricane of 1635, to the first slave ships, some British settlers of colonial America carried across the sea Puritan, biblical, scientific, and Aristotelian rationalizations of slavery and human hierarchy. From Western Europe and the new settlements in Latin America, some Puritans carried across their judgment of the many African peoples as one inferior people. They carried across rac- ist ideas—racist ideas that preceded American slavery, because the need to justify African slavery preceded colonial America.

AFTER ARAB MUSLIMS conquered parts of North Africa, Portugal, and Spain during the seventh century, Christians and Muslims battled for centuries over the prize of Mediterranean supremacy. Meanwhile, below the Sahara Desert, the West African empires of Ghana (700– 1200), Mali (1200–1500), and Songhay (1350–1600) were situated at the crossroads of the lucrative trade routes for gold and salt. A robust trans-Saharan trade emerged, allowing Europeans to obtain West Afri- can goods through Muslim intermediaries.

Ghana, Mali, and Songhay developed empires that could rival in size, power, scholarship, and wealth any in the world. Intellectu- als at universities in Timbuktu and Jenne pumped out scholarship and pumped in students from around West Africa. Songhay grew to be the largest. Mali may have been the most illustrious. The world’s great- est globe-trotter of the fourteenth century, who trotted from North Africa to Eastern Europe to Eastern Asia, decided to see Mali for him- self in 1352. “There is complete security in their country,” Moroccan

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Ibn Battuta marveled in his travel notes. “Neither traveler nor inhabi- tant in it has anything to fear from robbers or men of violence.”8

Ibn Battuta was an oddity—an abhorred oddity—among the Islamic intelligentsia in Fez, Morocco. Hardly any scholars had trav- eled far from home, and Battuta’s travel accounts threatened their own armchair credibility in depicting foreigners. None of Battuta’s antagonists was more influential than the intellectual tower of the Muslim world at that time, Tunisian Ibn Khaldun, who arrived in Fez just as Battuta returned from Mali. “People in the dynasty (in official positions) whispered to each other that he must be a liar,” Khaldun revealed in 1377 in The Muqaddimah, the foremost Islamic history of the premodern world. Khaldun then painted a very different picture of sub-Sahara Africa in The Muqaddimah: “The Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery,” Khaldun surmised, “because (Negroes) have little that is (essentially) human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals.” And the “same applies to the Slavs,” argued this disciple of Aristotle. Following Greek and Roman justifiers, Khaldun used climate theory to justify Islamic enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans and Eastern European Slavs—groups shar- ing only one obvious characteristic: their remoteness. “All their con- ditions are remote from those of human beings and close to those of wild animals,” Khaldun suggested. Their inferior conditions were nei- ther permanent nor hereditary, however. “Negroes” who migrated to the cooler north were “found to produce descendants whose colour gradually turns white,” Khaldun stressed. Dark-skinned people had the capacity for physical assimilation in a colder climate. Later, cultural assimilationists would imagine that culturally inferior African people, placed in the proper European cultural environment, could or should adopt European culture. But first physical assimilationists like Khaldun imagined that physically inferior African people, placed in the proper cold environment, could or should adopt European physicality: white skin and straight hair.9

Ibn Khaldun did not intend merely to demean African people as inferior. He intended to belittle all the different-looking African and Slavic peoples whom the Muslims were trading as slaves. Even

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so, he reinforced the conceptual foundation for racist ideas. On the eve of the fifteenth century, Khaldun helped bolster the foundation for assimilationist ideas, for racist notions of the environment produc- ing African inferiority. All an enslaver had to do was to stop justify- ing Slavic slavery and inferiority using climate theory, and focus the theory on African people, for the racist attitude toward dark-skinned people to be complete.

There was one enslavement theory focused on Black people already circulating, a theory somehow derived from Genesis 9:18–29, which said “that Negroes were the children of Ham, the son of Noah, and that they were singled out to be black as the result of Noah’s curse, which produced Ham’s colour and the slavery God inflicted upon his descendants,” as Khaldun explained. The lineage of this curse of Ham theory curves back through the great Persian scholar Tabari (838–923) all the way to Islamic and Hebrew sources. God had per- manently cursed ugly Blackness and slavery into the very nature of African people, curse theorists maintained. As strictly a climate theo- rist, Khaldun discarded the “silly story” of the curse of Ham.10

Although it clearly supposed Black inferiority, the curse theory was like an unelected politician during the medieval period. Muslim and Christian enslavers hardly gave credence to the curse theory: they enslaved too many non-Black descendants of Shem and Japheth, Ham’s supposed non-cursed brothers, for that. But the medieval curse theo- rists laid the foundation for segregationist ideas and for racist notions of Black genetic inferiority. The shift to solely enslaving Black people, and justifying it using the curse of Ham, was in the offing. Once that shift occurred, the disempowered curse theory became empowered, and racist ideas truly came into being.11

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CHAPTER 2

Origins of Racist Ideas

RICHARD MATHER AND John Cotton inherited from the English thinkers of their generation the old racist ideas that African slavery was natu- ral and normal and holy. These racist ideas were nearly two centuries old when Puritans used them in the 1630s to legalize and codify New England slavery—and Virginians had done the same in the 1620s. Back in 1415, Prince Henry and his brothers had convinced their father, King John of Portugal, to capture the principal Muslim trading depot in the western Mediterranean: Ceuta, on the northeastern tip of Morocco. These brothers were envious of Muslim riches, and they sought to eliminate the Islamic middleman so that they could find the southern source of gold and Black captives.

After the battle, Moorish prisoners left Prince Henry spellbound as they detailed trans-Saharan trade routes down into the disintegrat- ing Mali Empire. Since Muslims still controlled these desert routes, Prince Henry decided to “seek the lands by the way of the sea.” He sought out those African lands until his death in 1460, using his posi- tion as the Grand Master of Portugal’s wealthy Military Order of Christ (successor of the Knights Templar) to draw venture capital and loyal men for his African expeditions.

In 1452, Prince Henry’s nephew, King Afonso V, commissioned Gomes Eanes de Zurara to write a biography of the life and slave- trading work of his “beloved uncle.” Zurara was a learned and obedient commander in Prince Henry’s Military Order of Christ. In record- ing and celebrating Prince Henry’s life, Zurara was also implicitly

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obscuring his Grand Master’s monetary decision to exclusively trade in African slaves. In 1453, Zurara finished the inaugural defense of African slave-trading, the first European book on Africans in the mod- ern era. The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea begins the recorded history of anti-Black racist ideas. Zurara’s inaugural racist ideas, in other words, were a product of, not a producer of, Prince Henry’s racist policies concerning African slave-trading.1

The Portuguese made history as the first Europeans to sail along the Atlantic beyond the Western Sahara’s Cape Bojador in order to bring enslaved Africans back to Europe, as Zurara shared in his book. The six caravels, carrying 240 captives, arrived in Lagos, Portugal, on August 6, 1444. Prince Henry made the slave auction into a spectacle to show the Portuguese had joined the European league of serious slave-traders of African people. For some time, the Genoese of Italy, the Catalans of northern Spain, and the Valencians of eastern Spain had been raid- ing the Canary Islands or purchasing African slaves from Moroccan traders. Zurara distinguished the Portuguese by framing their African slave-trading ventures as missionary expeditions. Prince Henry’s com- petitors could not play that mind game as effectively as he did, in all likelihood because they still traded so many Eastern Europeans.2

But the market was changing. Around the time the Portuguese opened their sea route to a new slave export area, the old slave export area started to close up. In Ibn Khaldun’s day, most of the captives sold in Western Europe were Eastern Europeans who had been seized by Turkish raiders from areas around the Black Sea. So many of the seized captives were “Slavs” that the ethnic term became the root word for “slave” in most Western European languages. By the mid-1400s, Slavic communities had built forts against slave raiders, causing the supply of Slavs in Western Europe’s slave market to plunge at around the same time that the supply of Africans was increasing. As a result, Western Europeans began to see the natural Slav(e) not as White, but Black.3

THE CAPTIVES IN 1444 disembarked from the ship and marched to an open space outside of the city, according to Zurara’s chronicle. Prince Henry

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oversaw the slave auction, mounted on horseback, beaming in delight. Some of the captives were “white enough, fair to look upon, and well proportioned,” while others were “like mulattoes,” Zurara reported. Still others were “as black as Ethiops, and so ugly” that they almost appeared as visitors from Hell. The captives included people in the many shades of the Tuareg Moors as well as the dark-skinned people whom the Tuareg Moors may have enslaved. Despite their different ethnicities and skin colors, Zurara viewed them as one people—one inferior people.4

Zurara made it a point to remind his readers that Prince Henry’s “chief riches” in quickly seizing forty-six of the most valuable captives “lay in his own purpose; for he reflected with great pleasure upon the salvation of those souls that before were lost.” In building up Prince Henry’s evangelical justification for enslaving Africans, Zurara reduced these captives to barbarians who desperately needed not only religious but also civil salvation. “They lived like beasts, without any custom of reasonable beings,” he wrote. What’s more, “they have no knowledge of bread or wine, and they were without covering of clothes, or the lodgement of houses; and worse than all, they had no understanding of good, but only knew how to live in bestial sloth.” In Portugal, their lot was “quite the contrary of what it had been.” Zurara imagined slav- ery in Portugal as an improvement over their free state in Africa.5

Zurara’s narrative covered from 1434 to 1447. During that period, Zurara estimated, 927 enslaved Africans were brought to Portugal, “the greater part of whom were turned into the true path of salvation.” Zur- ara failed to mention that Prince Henry received the royal fifth (quinto), or about 185 of those captives, for his immense fortune. But that was irrelevant to his mission, a mission he accomplished. For convincing readers, successive popes, and the reading European world that Prince Henry’s Portugal did not engage in the slave trade for money, Zurara was handsomely rewarded as Portugal’s chief royal chronicler, and he was given two more lucrative commanderships in the Military Order of Christ. Zurara’s bosses quickly reaped returns from their slave trad- ing. In 1466, a Czech traveler noticed that the king of Portugal was making more selling captives to foreigners “than from all the taxes lev- ied on the entire kingdom.”6

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Zurara circulated the manuscript of The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea to the royal court as well as to scholars, investors, and captains, who then read and circulated it throughout Portugal and Spain. Zurara died in Lisbon in 1474, but his ideas about slavery endured as the slave trade expanded. By the 1490s, Portuguese explorers had crept southward along the West African coast, rounding the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean. In their growing networks of ports, agents, ships, crews, and financiers, pioneering Portuguese slave-traders and explorers circulated the racist ideas in Zurara’s book faster and far- ther than the text itself had reached. The Portuguese became the pri- mary source of knowledge on unknown Africa and the African people for the original slave-traders and enslavers in Spain, Holland, France, and England. By the time German printer Valentim Fernandes pub- lished an abridged version of Zurara’s book in Lisbon in 1506, enslaved Africans—and racist ideas—had arrived in the Americas.7

IN 1481, THE PORTUGUESE began building a large fort, São Jorge da Mina, known simply as Elmina, or “the mine,” as part of their plan to acquire Ghanaian gold. In due time, this European building, the first known to be erected south of the Sahara, became West Africa’s largest slave- trading post, the nucleus of Portugal’s operations in West Africa. A Genoese explorer barely three decades old may have witnessed the erection of Elmina Castle. Christopher Columbus, newly married to the daughter of a Genoese protégé of Prince Henry, desired to make his own story—but not in Africa. He looked instead to East Asia, the source of spices. After Portuguese royalty refused to sponsor his daring westward expedition, Queen Isabel of Spain, a great-niece of Prince Henry, consented. So in 1492, after sixty-nine days at sea, Columbus’s three small ships touched the shores that Europeans did not know existed: first the glistening Bahamas, and the next night, Cuba.8

Almost from Columbus’s arrival, Spanish colonists began to degrade and enslave the indigenous American peoples, naming them negros da terra (Blacks from the land), transferring their racist construc- tions of African people onto Native Americans. Over the years that

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followed, they used the force of the gun and the Bible in one of the most frightful and sudden massacres in human history. Thousands of Native Americans died resisting enslavement. More died from Euro- pean diseases, from the conditions they suffered while forcibly tilling fields, and on death marches searching and mining for gold. Thou- sands of Native Americans were driven off their land by Spanish set- tlers dashing into the colonies after riches. Spanish merchant Pedro de Las Casas settled in Hispaniola in 1502, the year the first enslaved Africans disembarked from a Portuguese slave ship. He brought along his eighteen-year-old son Bartolomé, who would play an outsized role in the direction slavery took in the so-called New World.9

By 1510, Bartolomé de Las Casas had accumulated land and cap- tives as well as his ordination papers as the Americas’ first priest. He felt proud in welcoming the Dominican Friars to Hispaniola in 1511. Sickened by Taíno slavery, the Friars stunned Las Casas and broke abolitionist ground, rejecting the Spanish line (taken from the Por- tuguese) that the Taíno people benefited, through Christianity, from slavery. King Ferdinand promptly recalled the Dominican Friars, but their antislavery sermons never left Bartolomé de Las Casas. In 1515, he departed for Spain, where he would conduct a lifelong campaign to ease the suffering of Native Americans, and, possibly more impor- tantly—solve the settlers’ extreme labor shortage. In one of his first written pleas in 1516, Las Casas suggested importing enslaved Afri- cans to replace the rapidly declining Native American laborers, a plea he made again two years later. Alonso de Zuazo, a University of Salamanca– trained lawyer, had made a similar recommendation back in 1510. “General license should be given to bring negroes, a [peo- ple] strong for work, the opposite of the natives, so weak who can work only in undemanding tasks,” Zuazo wrote. In time, some indige- nous peoples had caught wind of this new racist idea, and they readily agreed that a policy of importing African laborers would be better. An indigenous group in Mexico complained that the “difficult and arduous work” involved in harnessing a sugar crop was “only for the blacks and not for the thin and weak Indians.” Las Casas and company

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birthed twins—racist twins that some Native Americans and Africans took in: the myth of the physically strong, beastly African, and the myth of the physically weak Native American who easily died from the strain of hard labor.10