Stamped from the Beginning: Chapter 35: New Republicans Summary & Analysis

By the mid 1990s, there is a growing consensus among scholars that intelligence is too “transient,” “multifaceted,” and “relative” that it cannot be measured with anything as crude as a standardized test. Mounting a defense of standardized intelligence tests against this backlash, Harvard professors Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray publish The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. The authors insist that general intelligence is real and can be comparatively measured between humans. They call antiracist critiques of general intelligence “naïve” and assert that “cognitive ability is substantially heritable, apparently no less than 40 percent and no more than 80 percent.”

Herrnstein and Murray even warn that because the lower-intelligence “underclass” is having more children, the intellectual elite risk dying out. The book has a major impact. It arrives at a time when politicians are increasingly emphasizing the notion of “personal responsibility,” which becomes yet another way in which racists blame Black people for the problems they face. In this way, the antebellum idea that Black people are naturally lazy and irresponsible gains renewed life. After the “tough” Violent Crime Act is passed by the New Democrats, Republicans refuse to be outshone and promise to become even “tougher.” Kendi writes that both parties are ultimately vying for “the racist vote,” which in the mid 1990s is made up of a coalition of people of different races.  

When Angela Davis is awarded a President’s Chair professorship at UC Santa Cruz in 1995, Republicans once again renew their efforts to drag her down. They accuse her of attempting to incite a race war, echoing the accusations of Southern segregationists earlier in the 20th century and enslavers in the 19th. Although in some ways racist ideas have changed over the centuries, Kendi writes that they have also remained the same. Segregationists are still using the same tactic they’ve used forever: attempting to persuade others that racism does not exist. Former Reagan aide Dinesh D’Souza defends the idea that Black people as a group could be less intelligent than other races while also declaring “The End of Racism” in his book of this title. He uses his Indian heritage to dodge accusations that he is racist.

In this moment, segregationist thinking is bolstered by the establishment of white supremacist websites. Yet assimilationist ideas are also thriving, as debates around interracial adoption lead many assimilationists to imply that Black children will be “better off” if adopted by white parents. Meanwhile, Princeton professor John J. Dilulio invents the term “super-predators” to describe young Black men growing up in what he calls “moral poverty.” Rather than considering the massive economic discrimination these young men face, Dilulio recommends religion as the solution to their supposed moral bankruptcy.

In 1995, the biggest political mobilization in Black American history takes place in Washington, D.C.: the Million Man March. Davis and other Black feminists critique the masculinism of the March and its organizers. Meanwhile, a campaign begins to save the Black political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal from being executed for killing a white police officer in Philadelphia in 1982. After activists work to raise awareness of the vastly disproportionate rates at which Black people are given the death sentence, Abu-Jamal is granted an indefinite stay of execution, although he remains incarcerated. 

Clinton does not acknowledge the Million Man March. Instead, he gives a speech in Texas emphasizing his belief in racial progress and encouraging “racial reconciliation.” However, in the very same speech he invokes myths about Black criminality, welfare dependence, absent fathers, and “out-of-wedlock pregnancy,” claiming that belief in such racist myths is “not racist.” In 1996, he signs the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which cuts welfare. That same year, California votes to ban affirmative action with Proposition 209; almost immediately the proportion of Black people in the University of California system begins to decline. Crucially, the Proposition 209 used antiracist rhetoric and ideas in order to style itself as antiracist even though, Kendi writes, banning affirmative action is obviously a racist move.  

On the same day that Proposition 209 passes, Clinton is reelected. In June of the following year, he gives a speech at UC San Diego, promising to lead “the American people in a great and unprecedented conversation on race.” Yet many white Americans have already started to prefer a different tactic, which has come to be known as the “color-blind” approach. “Color-bind” racists, Kendi writes, insist that anyone who so much as mentions race is the true racist.