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
Angela Davis, a Brandeis Junior from Birmingham, Alabama, is on study abroad in Biarritz, France, when she learns of the deaths of her four girls in a bombing at a church in her city. Three out of four of the girls are personal friends of hers. Angela’s parents raised her on “a steady diet of anticapitalist and antiracist ideas”; as a result, she recalls never having had any “desire to be white.” As a teenager, she became interested in socialism and joined a youth activist organization through which she participated in sit-ins. She finds the student movement at Brandeis patronizing to Black people. At a youth summit in Helsinki in 1962, she listens to one of her idols, James Baldwin, criticize the nonviolent, assimilationist bent of the civil rights movement.
Angela Davis is unique in the book as the only central figure to not hold racist ideas at any point in life. This puts her in a tradition of other visionary antiracist Black women, such as Ida B. Wells and Zora Neale Hurston, who faced ostracization in their own time for being so uniquely steadfast in their antiracism. These women provide a note of optimism: racist ideas may be everywhere, but as Wells, Hurston, and Davis show, they are not inescapable.
Themes
At Brandeis, Davis becomes a student of the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Her junior year is cut short by the news of the Birmingham church bombing. Davis comes to feel that through its complicity in ongoing racism, the entire U.S. is “guilty of this murder.” President Kennedy launches an investigation into the bombing, but within weeks he is assassinated in Dallas, Texas. New president Lyndon Johnson vows to pass the Civil Rights Act in Kennedy’s memory. Meanwhile, after his hajj—the pilgrimage to Mecca all Muslims are encouraged to complete at least once in their lifetime—Malcolm X encounters Muslims of all races and ethnicities harmoniously united. He retires some of his previous hostile rhetoric about white people, instead focusing his ire on racists (of all races).
Kendi shows that one recurring conflict in the Black radical tradition rests in the tension between religion and separatism. For many antiracist Black separatists, interacting with and working alongside white people is profoundly undesirable. At the same time, most of the world’s major religions—including Christianity and Islam—encourage a close sense of kinship among believers of all races. Malcolm X’s hajj shifts him from the former to the latter view, a pivot that receives mix reactions among his supporters.
Themes
When Malcolm returns to the U.S., the 1964 Civil Rights Act is stuck thanks to the longest filibuster in the Senate’s history. While the Act eliminates Jim Crow segregation, it also inaugurates a whole new era of racist ideas. These are based around the notion that because (one form of) segregation is over, racism is over, and thus Black people are to blame for the injustices and disparities that continue to afflict them. The 1964 Act bans only the explicit intention of racial discrimination; this preserves the “myth” that only the South is racist, when the disparities that exist in the North makes clear that the North is, too. Discrimination continues, albeit in a different form. Instead of open eugenicist policies, for example, eugenics-inspired intelligence tests are used to discriminate instead.
The era of blaming Black people for the struggles and injustices they face because racism is supposedly over is one that persists to this day. Indeed, although the final section of the book begins in the 1960s, many of its lessons are as relevant to the present as they are to that time. This makes it an especially useful guide for those trying to understand how racist ideas work currently and how to eliminate them from one’s thinking.
Themes
In the 1964 presidential election, George Wallace runs against Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination. Wallace’s popularity leads him to observe of the white American public: “they all hate black people […] The whole United States is southern!” During the same election, Barry Goldwater’s ultra-conservative candidacy brings many longtime Democrats over to the Republican Party. Johnson feels far more worried by the left radicalism of protestors against police brutality and economic injustice than he does by the conservative radicalism of Goldwater. In February 1965, Malcolm X is assassinated at a Harlem rally. Both Baldwin and King express their sorrow, although the New York Times pronounces, “The Apostle of Hate Is Dead.”
Kendi suggests that Wallace’s pronouncement, while misguided in many ways, illuminates an uncomfortable reality. Throughout American history, Northerners displace blame by creating the impression that only the South is racist. But as Kendi shows, this is not and has never been true.
Themes
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Later that year, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, co-written with Alex Haley, is published posthumously. Kendi writes that it is perhaps the single most important antiracist book in American history. Speaking to a Howard University audience in March 1965, President Lyndon Johnson makes the surprisingly antiracist observation that it is nonsense to pretend that Black people can suddenly compete freely and fairly with others after having been so severely disadvantaged for so long. Johnson also openly admits that advances in status and opportunity are largely limited to the Black elite, while for poor Black communities, life is getting increasingly difficult. At the same time, he still manages to blame these ongoing issues on both structural inequity and Black people themselves, specifically citing “the breakdown of the Negro family structure.”
The fact that Johnson makes an antiracist claim in the middle of a speech riddled with assimilationist thinking suggests that he—like many other racists—actually does understand the truths lurking behind racist fictions. However, Kendi shows how Johnson chooses to indulge racist fictions instead, likely because they suit his self-interest, which in Johnson’s case revolves around maintaining political power.
Themes
Aligning with this last observation of President Lyndon Johnson’s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan develops a report on Black families that laments the “matriarchal structure” disproportionately found within Black communities. The report combines racism and sexism to pathologize Black communities and blame them for the issues they face. It is leaked to the press in August 1965, around the same time the Voting Rights Act is passed. This Act bans the discrimination that for decades has been disenfranchising Black people in the South. Unlike the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act focuses on outcomes (the disparity in Black and white voting rates) rather than intentions (explicit announcements of racist intent). In this sense, it is “the most effective piece of antiracist legislation ever passed” by Congress.
This passage is about the Moynihan Report, which Kendi underscores as one of the most significant—and damaging—documents in the history of racist ideas in America. In pathologizing Black family structures, it paves the way for generations of harmful ideas and policies. Indeed, it can be placed in a lineage that began during slavery, when enslavers forcefully broke up families and disrespected the kinship structures that existed among the enslaved. While the Moynihan Report may be less obviously violent, Kendi argues that its devastating impact should not be underestimated.
Themes
