Stamped from the Beginning: Chapter 23: Black Judases Summary & Analysis

In the late 19th century, the British doctor Havelock Ellis introduces the term “homosexual” to the English language and attempts to defend queer people from discriminatory laws and treatment. Like sexologists, racist scholars constantly search for ways to “prove” that Black people’s supposed immorality and criminality is physically embedded in their bodies. In 1896, the insurance statistician Frederick Hoffman publishes a widely read book entitled Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, which argues that Black people are heading toward “gradual extinction” brought on by criminality and disease. This argument becomes the basis of many insurance companies refusing to provide Black people with insurance on the basis that they are “a supposedly dying race.”

Du Bois rejects the argument that Black people are going extinct but does not challenge the assertion about Black people’s supposedly higher rates of criminality. In an 1897 address given to the American Negro Academy, Du Bois supports the idea that the races are “biologically distinct” and that Black people are prone to “immorality, crime, and laziness” due to the lingering effect of slavery. In 1899, he publishes The Philadelphia Negro, a generally antiracist account of how discrimination is at the root of the social problems Black people face. But it nonetheless still contains condemnation of supposedly immoral poor Black people and sexually deviant Black women. 

Booker T. Washington earns substantial funding and support from white philanthropists due to his ability to put white people “at ease” (even if it means making racist jokes). In 1899, Du Bois is disturbed by the lynching of a Black man who killed his white employer in self-defense. In 1890, he attends the first Pan-African Conference in London and recommends the “gradual decolonization” of Africa and the Caribbean on the basis that “the darker races” are currently inferior but capable of progressing. Around this same moment, the U.S. acquires Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War. Both segregationists and antiracists oppose U.S. imperialism, though for different reasons; assimilationists support it, and for the most part it is this position that “wins.”

Meanwhile, a large number of European, Asian, and Latin American immigrants arrive in the U.S. and face prejudice of their own. Some choose to act in solidarity with Black people but most work hard to distance themselves and quickly internalize anti-Black ideas. In 1901, the last Black representative in Congress leaves. Aggressive disenfranchisement and intimidation have all but totally destroyed the existence of Black politicians. During this period, William Archibald Dunning trains a generation of historians through the Dunning School of Reconstruction, which blames Reconstruction’s failures on “barbarous freedmen.” The histories of slavery that Dunning School members create characterize enslavers as benevolent using the “evidence” of plantation documents.

The most influential member of the Dunning School is a novelist named Thomas Dixon Jr., who is horrified by how (he thinks) white Southerners are demonized in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Dixon writes a trilogy of historical fiction that most readers falsely assume to be true, which again portrays white Southerners as helpless victims of Black corruption and evil during the Reconstruction era. Meanwhile, in 1901, Booker T. Washington publishes his autobiography, Up from Slavery, which emphasizes how “White saviors” were crucial to his success. In Du Bois’s review of the lauded book, he defends antiracist thought against assimilationist accusations that opposing racism was just as bad as segregationist thinking.

In the same year, Black writer and legislator William Hannibal Thomas publishes The American Negro: What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become. This book describes Black people as naturally criminal and driven by immoral instincts. Despite Thomas’s attempt to distance himself from whiteness, white audiences take him as a representative “expert” about his race; The American Negro is hailed as “the most authoritative, believable, and comprehensive tract ever published on the subject.” However, Black readers accuse Thomas of being a “Judas.”

In 1901, Theodore Roosevelt, who has just been sworn in as president, invites Booker T. Washington to the White House. Black communities across the nation celebrate this event, while segregationists furiously denounce it. In 1903, Du Bois publishes what will become his most famous work, The Souls of Black Folk. The book falsely characterizes Black people as possessing a “simple faith” in the midst of a corrupt, materialistic world. Yet it also powerfully describes the “double-consciousness” that Black people are forced to inhabit in a racist world. Du Bois expresses his wish for a future in which being both Black and American does not feel like a contradiction. Kendi writes that the book conveys the contradiction in Du Bois’s own thinking: his struggle in straddling antiracist and assimilationist thought.

In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois critiques Booker T. Washington’s compromising tendencies while expressing the classist idea that poor Black people discredit the race and that the “Talented Tenth” will be able to uplift the Black community as a whole. Souls receives mostly glowing reviews in the Black press. Following its publication, scholars of race and other leaders embrace the idea of uplift suasion and the Talented Tenth. This cements the notion that Black people are “responsible for changing racist White minds.” It also ignores the reality that decades of uplift suasion have not worked, Kendi writes, as the U.S. of 1903 is perhaps more racist than ever.