Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Stamped from the Beginning, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Discrimination, Racist Ideas, and Ignorance
Segregationists and Assimilationists vs. Antiracists
Media, Institutions, and the Transmission of Knowledge
The Invention of Blackness and Whiteness
The Illogic of Racism
Summary
Analysis
Harriet Beecher Stowe is a middle-class white woman from Maine, the daughter of a prominent religious family and wife of a distinguished professor. Like many of those involved in the early women’s rights movement, she also has experience in abolitionist campaigning. At a universal suffrage conference that takes place in Ohio in 1851, one of the speakers is a middle-aged Black woman named Sojourner Truth. Treated with hostility by the white women and men in attendance, Truth perseveres in delivering her powerful address, in which she demands: “Ain’t I a Woman?” It is one of the most important moments in the burgeoning movement of antiracist feminism. Stowe likely heard Truth’s speech at the Ohio event.
Stowe and Truth represent two very different forms of abolitionism and feminism, social movements that are, as Kendi explains, closely linked during the 19th century. For Stowe, engaging in abolition is more of a charitable project, a reflection of the values of the Northern Christian intellectual milieu in which she is situated. For Truth, abolitionism and feminism are matters of life and death; as one of the earliest prominent Black feminist voices, she is isolated and shunned from many sides, including by white women.
Themes
In 1852, Stowe publishes a book entitled Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which she praises Black “docility,” fondly describing Black people’s “childlike simplicity of affection, and facility of forgiveness.” Essentially, this is what Garrison has been attempting to do throughout his career: not dissuade people from holding racist ideas, but rather persuade them to see the characteristics racism attributes to Black people in a positive light. Stowe implies that “Blacks [are] spiritually superior because of their intellectual inferiority.” Stowe’s ultimate recommendation is that white people should teach Black people so that they can reach “moral and intellectual maturity,” at which point they should be relocated back to Africa, where they can improve their ancestral homeland via the principles they absorbed in America.
This passage clarifies what is so sinister about the racism that both Garrison and Stowe harbored. Although they are both opposed to slavery, both of them still hold profoundly racist views about Blackness. Indeed, by incorporating these racist views into the abolitionist movement—for example, by arguing that Black people should be allowed to be free because they are weak and docile—individuals like Stowe and Garrison corrupt and weaken the movement.
Themes
Garrison praises Uncle Tom’s Cabin, although he is troubled by its emphasis on submissiveness. Douglass offers an assimilationist critique of Stowe’s support of colonization. Yet the Black writer and doctor Martin R. Delany is most unequivocally critical, due to his rejection of the paternalism of the white abolitionist movement. Black men more broadly feel critical of Stowe’s approving depiction of the submissive, effeminate character Uncle Tom. At times during this era, Black men’s rejection of racism and slavery takes the form of a desire to “rule women.”
Here, Kendi makes the complex argument that while it is reasonable (and important) to critique Stowe’s depiction of the meek, submissive Uncle Tom, this should not be done through a masculinist rejection of Uncle Tom’s softness and seeming femininity. To do so risks further marginalizing Black women and femininity in service of macho ideals.
Themes
In 1852, the Democratic candidate and former Mexican-American War general Franklin Pierce wins the presidential election in a loss for the abolitionist movement. In 1852, a group of authors including Josiah C. Nott and George Gliddon publish an 800-page book on polygenesis, Types of Mankind. The book is an enormous success. Meanwhile, Herman Melville publishes “The ‘Gees” in Harper’s Magazine, an antiracist parody of 19th-century race science and polygenesis in particular. In his own reflections, Douglass points out that no one believed in polygenesis before Atlantic slavery and that polygenesists almost all tend to be proslavery. With this observation he “sum[s] up the history of racist ideas in a single sentence.”
Polygenesis may be a political fiction with no scientific basis, but this doesn’t stop Nott and Gliddon—two supposed experts in their fields—from writing 800 pages about it. Melville’s satirical response and Douglass’s insightful observation both show that even at the time, many people are aware of how absurd racist ideas truly are.
Themes
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At the same time, Douglass embraces the climate theory notion that the hair and skin of Black people in America is steadily becoming whiter in appearance (and that this is a good thing). Despite their mutual opposition to slavery, polygenesis, and segregation, Douglass and Garrison’s friendship dissolves. Douglass dislikes the patronizing “paternalism” of the white abolitionist movement, whereas Garrison suggests that the enslaved are not able to properly understand the aims and tactics of abolition. Stowe steps in, attempting to stop the two men from quarreling. They agree to “forg[ive], but […] not forget.”
This passage is a reminder that the history of the abolitionist movement is not a history of harmonious cross-racial friendship and collaboration. Indeed, Kendi highlights that when Black abolitionists do build relationships with their white peers, it is usually only possible because they force themselves to ignore their white peers’ racism.
Themes
