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
Kendi writes that many of those who vote for Obama in 2008 are racist; voting for him does not make them any less so. While his electoral success may seem like a victory of antiracism, it could also be seen as the convergence of a large number of auspicious factors (many of which have little to do with race). Nevertheless, commentators soon begin to declare that the U.S. is officially “post-racial”—a notion, Kendi says, that is obviously false. Fox News commentator Glenn Beck claims that Obama has “a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture,” declaring Obama “a racist.” But Kendi writes that, in reality, Obama publicly critiqued Black people constantly—yet in the new environment of “post-racial” America, this is not perceived as racist.
During the Obama years, a paradox develops within racist thought. According to this paradox, which Kendi describes in this passage, racism is over and reverse racism is real. This recalls the claims made by Southern Democrats during Reconstruction that simply affording Black people the right to vote would result in Black “supremacy.” As Kendi has shown many times by now, the ludicrousness of this racist idea makes it even more powerful.
Themes
Postracialists choose to completely ignore the starkly enduring disparities that exist between the Black and white communities. Yet despite being silenced by both assimilationists and segregationists, antiracists keep fighting. They join the Occupy movement of 2011, demand reparations for slavery, fight in the struggle for LGBT rights, and—most of all—continue to oppose the racism of the criminal justice system. In Michelle Alexander’s 2010 bestseller The New Jim Crow, the law professor points out that all the forms of racist discrimination technically outlawed (such as housing discrimination, the inability to vote, and forced labor at less than minimum wage) are still in place when it comes to criminals.
Much of the argument in Stamped from the Beginning draws on the research of The New Jim Crow, which is one of several books that argues that rather than seeing Black history as a series of discrete eras (slavery, Reconstruction, segregation, civil rights) it should be viewed as one continuous line, where slavery was never properly ended but instead just remade.
Themes
A new wave of antiracist activism emerges when George Zimmerman murders an unarmed Black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Florida in 2012. Outrage ensues after Zimmerman’s acquittal and the murders of Shereese Francis, Rekia Boyd, Shantel Davis, and so many others. Kendi writes that Racists find ways to blame Black people for the violence inflicted on them through the idea of the “thug,” which some argue is nothing more than the “post-racial” version of the n-word. The acquittal of George Zimmerman leads the activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometti to found the #BlackLivesMatter movement in 2013—a movement that opposes anti-Black racism in conjunction with all other forms of oppression.
At the time Kendi is writing, the #BlackLivesMatter movement is very much still ongoing. Readers might wonder how people in the future will conceptualize the movement as Kendi has done with the first abolitionist movement, the Harlem Renaissance, the civil rights movement, and Black Power.
Themes
By studying the history of racist ideas, it becomes clear what tactics antiracists need to retire in order to win the battle against racism. These chiefly include “self-sacrifice, uplift suasion, and educational persuasion.” The idea that racism “materially benefits” most white people is actually a myth, which means that it is not helpful to invest in ideas of white “self-sacrifice” in order to advance the cause of antiracism. Antiracism should not be seen as a matter of altruism and nor should racism be seen as a matter of selfishness. While it might superficially seem as if white people benefit from supporting racism, this is only true of a tiny minority of very wealthy, white, straight, non-immigrant men. It is actually in most white people’s “intelligent self-interest” to oppose racism.
In this passage, Kendi argues that it’s a myth that most white people materially benefit from racism, and that acknowledging this reality will help more people oppose racism.
Themes
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Similarly, Kendi notes that uplift suasion has proven to be completely ineffective in combating racism and has in fact accelerated racism in many cases. When Black people achieve higher status, they are often met with a fiercer racist backlash than ever. Moreover, the status of any individual Black person is not indicative of the status of Black people as a whole. Finally, despite how many people believe that education is the remedy for racism, history has proven this false, too. Racist ideas are not born out of ignorance, but in order to justify racist policies, which are themselves the result of the self-interested actions of a small elite. Having been one of education persuasion’s biggest advocates, Du Bois came to abandon the tactic, having realized that the torrent of facts and information he and other Black scholars produced did little to mitigate racism.
Here, Kendi encourages readers to learn from history and to avoid repeating the same mistakes such that the fight against racism no longer becomes an infinitely repeating cycle. But while he clearly highlights what doesn’t work (education and uplift suasion), it is also worth remembering that the question of how to eliminate racist ideas is far from simple. It continues to bewilder and frustrate even those who, like Kendi, are professionally trained scholars of race.
Themes
Kendi writes that, if they choose to, legislators today could eradicate racial discrimination and institute true “immediate equality” at last. Doing so would invite the criticisms of postracialists who would falsely claim such legislation discriminates against white people. Unfortunately, those with the power to end racism tend to be the tiny elite whom racism actually benefits, which means they have little incentive to end it. The truth is that very few people in positions of power volunteer to give that power up. Yet by acting together, antiracists can focus their efforts on those in power and try to force them to end racist discrimination.
Kendi’s emphasizes that discrimination needs to be eliminated before racist ideas are. As he has shown, much energy has been wasted on trying to dissolve racist ideas, which—as long as discrimination continues to exist—will simply continue to be produced.
Themes
The history of antiracist protest shows that it can be highly effective in forcing those in power to act. At the same time, protesting against racist power should not be “mistaken for seizing power.” In this sense, Kendi writes, antiracists must seize and maintain control of “institutions, neighborhood, counties, states, nations—the world.” This is sure to happen eventually. It may even be happening now.
Kendi’s sweeping call to action at the end of Stamped from the Beginning points back to the idea that, when examining the history of racist ideas, moderation has rarely worked as an antiracist strategy.
Themes
