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
W. E. B. Du Bois’s description of Reconstruction and its aftermath is as follows: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again towards slavery.” Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, a small town in Massachusetts. After his Franco-Haitian father abandoned the family “Willie” was raised by a single mother, Mary Silvina Burghardt. He recalls becoming aware of his race for the first time at the age of 10, when another young girl refused to take his visiting-card. From this point forward, Du Bois became determined to prove that he was as worthy as (if not better than) his white peers.
The incident described here, in which Du Bois becomes aware of his difference, is a motif within autobiographical writing that critically examines race. Note, however, that this motif is almost always used by writers of color. Few white writers recall the moment in childhood in which they discovered that they are white. This is because whiteness has been made into the invisible, “neutral” norm, enabling white people to ignore their own racialization.
Themes
The world within which Du Bois grows up is hostile to this mission. In 1883, the Supreme Court rules the 1875 Civil Rights Act unconstitutional; Du Bois’s first publication, at the age of 15, denounces his local community’s apathy to this ruling. Meanwhile, much “propaganda” is issued regarding the emergence of the so-called New South. White Southerners proclaim that in the antebellum era there existed a friendly, even loving, relationship between Black people and their enslavers, and that this positive relation is now returning. This is also the moment at which the segregationist fiction of “separate but equal” is born. The idea that Black people were aided and bettered by slavery helps justify intensified racist oppression in the post-Reconstruction South.
As Kendi explains in this passage, the young Du Bois has a sharp intellect and strong sense of justice, but he grows up in a world filled with nonsensical racist fictions. Kendi implies that this is one of the most maddening things about the history of racist ideas. Those who are intelligent and clear-sighted, with a strong instinct for justice, are often ostracized, belittled, misunderstood, or treated as delusional extremists, while those who hold racist views are rewarded.
Themes
The teenage Du Bois’s dream is to attend Harvard; local white people in his town raise money for him to attend Fisk instead, the best Black college in the country. Fisk is run by white philanthropists and its students are taught by white teachers. Overall, the institution is a “factory” of assimilationist ideas, and Du Bois quickly begins churning these ideas out as editor of the student newspaper The Herald. One of his pieces for the newspaper is a glowing review of George Washington Williams’s History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880.
As this passage indicates, institutions like Fisk represent both progress and regression. The university allows the extremely talented Du Bois to gain a rigorous formal education alongside other intelligent Black students. But at the same time, his curriculum is embedded with assimilationist thinking that is ultimately designed to help maintain the racist status quo.
Themes
Faced with centuries of racist scholarship, Williams encounters a conundrum that will plague Black scholars for centuries to come: let these false racist ideas go unquestioned in his work or revise them and be accused of lacking scholarly objectivity. Ultimately, Williams challenges some racist ideas but reproduces others. His book is also notable for its sexist portrayal of Black women. In 1888, Du Bois gives the graduation speech at Fisk, in which he describes the first chancellor of Germany, Otto von Bismarck, as the ideal leader Black people should model themselves on—despite von Bismarck’s participation in brutal colonialism in Africa. Leaving the South after graduating, Du Bois achieves his longstanding dream of attending Harvard.
The notion of scholarly objectivity plagues Black intellectuals from before Du Bois’s time until the present, and this passage helps explain why. In a world where racist ideas are the norm, challenging racist ideas can make a person seem biased. But Kendi underscores that antiracist scholarship is objective scholarship because it pierces through the fiction of racist ideas in order to access the truth.
Themes
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