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
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.”
Kendi’s book has thoroughly demonstrated the tenacious resilience of racist ideas. No matter how many times science proves these ideas wrong—no matter how little evidence can be found to support them—racist ideas keep being produced by those situated in the country’s most esteemed institutions.
Themes
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.
This passage illuminates that most racist ideas aren’t actually new, but are rather recycled versions of previous ideas. Kendi suggests that the supposedly new insights being offered by Herrnstein and Murray are in fact from one perspective simply new versions of ideas that were produced during slavery.
Themes
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.
Although Kendi does not devote much of the book to it, anti-Black racist ideas are also produced by non-Black people of color, as the example of Dinesh D’Souza shows. Kendi shows that in a society with a poor understanding of racism, D’Souza is able to posture as if he is not racist because he has Indian heritage. In reality, as Kendi has shown, not only can anyone of any race hold racist ideas, but all non-Black people harbor responsibility for anti-Black racism in particular.
Themes
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.
The dehumanizing term “super-predators” highlights how, in the supposedly color-blind, nonracist 1990s, racist ideas that imply Black people are “savage” animalistic “brutes” are as strong as ever. Indeed, the term “super-predators” fuses the dehumanizing language of the colonial and slavery eras with the new language of criminality introduced in the latter half of the 20th century, highlighting the continuity between these two forms of racism.
Themes
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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.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a journalist and activist who joined the Black Panthers at the age of 14. He was a supporter of MOVE, a Black liberation community in Philadelphia that was bombed by the Philadelphia Police Department, killing 11 people (including five children). Kendi shows that his near execution and continual incarceration is a prominent example of the brutality and profound injustice with which the U.S. treats Black radicals.
Themes
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.
Like many other politicians of the contemporary period, there is an enormous gap between (parts of) Clinton’s rhetoric and the reality of the policies he is instituting. His emphasis on progress and “reconciliation” could be read as a celebration—and encouragement—of assimilationism. Rather than continuing to fight for racial justice, Clinton effectively tells Black people to mollify themselves by invoking the myth that the U.S. is less racist than it used to be. With evidence like the ongoing demonization of Black families and repeal of affirmative action, it is clear that this is not true.
Themes
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.
While Clinton claims to want to have a productive conversation about race, the era he helps usher in is one of silence about racial issues. As Kendi points out, this silence is designed to mask the racist policies that Clinton’s administration continues to implement.
Themes
