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
In 1984, NBC’s The Cosby Show makes its debut. The show is a masterpiece in “uplift and media suasion”; assimilationists are convinced of its power to “redeem the Black family in the eyes of White America.” While some minds may be changed by the stereotype-busting representation of the fictional Huxtable family, others see the family as “extraordinary Negroes” who are exceptional for being distinct from the racist image of the Black community generated by Reagan’s War on Drugs. Indeed, media propaganda continues to rage with the invention of the “crack baby,” a myth about deformed children born to crack-using mothers that has no basing in science.
The stark contrast between The Cosby Show and the “crack baby” is a clear example of two very different forms of racist ideas that are nonetheless both damaging. While the fictional Huxtable family might not seem like it conveys derogatory ideas about Blackness, Kendi suggests that, when viewing the overall context of assimilation and respectability that The Cosby Show perpetuates, it becomes clear that the Huxtables and crack babies are two sides of the same pathologizing coin.
Themes
In the 1988 presidential election, vice president George H. W. Bush soars ahead of his opponent, Democrat Michael Dukakis, by claiming that Dukakis is soft on crime. Meanwhile the Supreme Court case McCleskey v. Kemp ruled that despite Black people being sentenced to death at four times the rate of white people in Georgia, this does not constitute grounds to override death sentences for Black inmates unless explicitly racist language is used to justify the sentence. This ruling solidifies the anti-Black infrastructure of mass incarceration. A new wave of resistance to this racist infrastructure emerges in the form of early hip hop culture, with tracks like N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police.”
The Bush/Dukakis election underlines the extent to which Nixon and Reagan changed American politics forever. From the 1970s and especially ‘80s onward, it becomes increasingly mandatory for politicians from every side of the political spectrum to announce that they are “tough on crime,” emotive language that usually means introducing harsh criminal legislation, increasing funding for police, and building new prisons.
Themes
The emergence of hip hop dovetails with the blossoming of Black Studies. In 1988, Temple University’s Black Studies department becomes the first to offer a Ph.D. in the field, led by the founder of Afrocentrism Molefi Kete Asante. The following year, Public Enemy releases its resistance anthem “Fight the Power.” That same year, UCLA professor Kimberlé Crenshaw organizes a retreat with a number of other legal scholars. She has just written “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” In this essay, she proposes a new paradigm called “intersectional theory,” which takes into account how sexism, racism, classism, and other axes of oppression interact together.
Kendi himself was trained in Temple University’s historic Black Studies department, which remains under the leadership of chair Molefi Kete Asante. As the founding theorist of Afrocentrism, Asante has an enormous impact in shifting Black Studies away from Eurocentric models of thought.
Themes
In a speech at California State University at Northridge in 1990, Angela Davis warns that “African Americans are suffering the most oppression since slavery.” This infuriates those who cling to a belief in racial progress. In 1991, the Cold War officially ends; Reagan laments that the West has now lost its “common, uplifting purpose” (of opposing communism). At home, Black women (especially low-income Black mothers) continue to be demonized via the “welfare queen” stereotype,” a myth politicians use in order to gain popularity.
Davis’ bold statement in this passage is another devastating blow to the idea of linear progress. While those focused on the achievements of the Black intellectual, cultural, and economic elite might find it ludicrous to say that in 1990 Black people are facing the worst oppression since slavery, Kendi suggests that if one focuses on poor communities, then Davis’ statement appears much more plausible.
Themes
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In 1991, footage is released of the Black taxi driver Rodney King being brutally beaten by members of the Los Angeles Police Department. An uproar ensues. Yet while Bush condemns King’s beating, he maintains his “law and order” approach. Around this time, Bush nominates a Black justice, Clarence Thomas, to the Supreme Court. Thomas is a lifelong advocate of “self-reliance.” His nomination is disrupted by his former assistant, Anita Hill, who accuses him of having sexually harassed her while she was working for him. Thomas denies the charges, claiming the whole affair is a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.” While Black feminists come out in support of Hill, Thomas is still confirmed, joining a Supreme Court that has effectively “gutted” the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The beating of Rodney King by members of the LAPD and ensuing riots in Los Angeles were one of the early defining moments of the 1990s.
Themes
As the AIDS crisis intensifies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, HIV-positive individuals fight against demonization that often takes an anti-Black character. In 1991, Angela Davis and 800 other members of the Communist Party cosign a critique of the party’s “racism, elitism, and sexism.” After the party refuses to reelect any of the signatories to office, Davis and others leave for good. By this point, the Democratic Party is undergoing a transformation into the “New Democrats” under the leadership of Bill Clinton, who proudly defines himself by refusing to be “soft on crime.”
Kendi suggests that the anti-Black nature of HIV stigma originates in the fact that the earliest AIDS cases tended to be gay men and Haitians. As the epidemic spreads, transmission occurs disproportionately among Black, Latinx, and poor communities. And at the time Kendi is writing, Black people still have the highest rate of HIV infection in the U.S.
Themes
In April 1992, an all-white jury acquits the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King. Immediately, a six-day insurrection takes place in Los Angeles. The antiracist congresswoman Maxine Waters argues against terming it a “riot,” explaining that this makes it seem directionless rather than a reasonable reaction to injustice. Clinton, however, calls the rioters “savage” and “lawless vandals.” Soon after, he promises to “end welfare as we know it.” In November, he is elected president. At the National Congress of Black Women in 1993, the civil rights activist C. Delores Tucker indicts the apparent misogyny, materialism, and violence, of “Gangsta rap.”
Here, Kendi highlights how Bill Clinton’s rhetoric sounds much more like that of Reagan, Bush, and other Republicans than it does that of a Democrat, which highlights a general shift rightward in American politics that occurred during and after the Reagan era.
Themes
In 1994, MIT scholar Evelyn Hammonds organizes a conference entitled “Black Women in the Academy: Defending Our Name.” For the first time in American history, Black women scholars come together to discuss their work and lives. Davis, who at this point is the “most famous African American woman academic,” gives the closing keynote address. In her speech, she rebukes “contemporary law and order discourse” and encourages the formation of a “new” abolitionist movement aimed at dismantling police and prisons. The Clinton administration’s plans, however, are quite the opposite: that same year, Clinton signs the $30 billion Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. It marks yet another escalation of mass incarceration.
For many years, abolitionists like Davis are marginalized and characterized as radical extremists. Throughout the book, Kendi argues that those truly committed to antiracism are demonized as too radical before the importance of their vision is eventually acknowledged.
Themes
