As a book concerned with racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning plays close attention to how ideas are transmitted via media, educational institutions, political rhetoric, and scientific thought. Kendi concludes that many of these structures and institutions—from travel writing, to universities, to cinema—have had a sinister impact in spreading and popularizing racist ideas. Indeed, throughout modern history, the production of knowledge itself has usually meant the production of racism. At the same time, though, Kendi indicates that by understanding how racist ideas travel through media and institutions, it is possible to begin eliminating racist thought and replace it with antiracist knowledge.
One of the simplest ways in which racist ideas are distributed is through universities, including (and perhaps especially) those thought to be the preeminent intellectual institutions in the world. Kendi shows how polygenesis, eugenics, the supposed “benevolence” of slavery, and many other racist ideas were developed and advanced by scholars based at universities such as Cambridge, Harvard, Stanford, and similarly esteemed institutions. Universities’ role as producers of racist ideas makes sense given how exclusionary universities have historically been. This fact is illustrated by the poet Phillis Wheatley, who in “To the University of Cambridge” expressed a longing to attend Harvard, which at the time was only open to white men. The fact that the immensely talented Wheatley was automatically denied admission to Harvard highlights how the university—ostensibly a place to develop and produce knowledge—ended up reproducing racist ideas by nature of its exclusionary admissions policy.
However, it was not just white universities like Harvard that contributed to racist ideas. As an immensely talented Black student entering college in the late 19th century, W. E. B. Du Bois—like Wheatley—could not initially live out his dream of going to Harvard. (Although he would later complete his doctorate there, becoming the first African American to do so.) Instead, he attended Fisk University, which at the time was the leading institution in the country for Black students. While one might assume that such a space would not contribute to the production of racist ideas, Kendi points out that Fisk was in fact a major driver of assimilationist views. Kendi writes: “Controlled by White philanthropists and instructors, Fisk was one of the nation’s preeminent factories of uplift suasion and assimilationist ideas. Du Bois consumed these ideas like his peers and started reproducing them when he became the editor of Fisk’s student newspaper, The Herald.” In other words, part of what Du Bois learned at Fisk was to think of himself and other Black people as inferior and only capable of redeeming themselves through becoming closer to whiteness.
If universities were a space in which many racist ideas were produced, the arts and media—including forms such as sermons, pamphlets, plays, travel writing, poetry, newspapers, and films—were how they reached a mass audience. Throughout history, travel has usually only been accessible to a small minority of any given society. As a result, early modern ideas about race—the precursors to the racist ideas that have existed throughout American history—were spread through literature. As Kendi explains, “Explorers wrote about their adventures, and their tales fascinated Europeans. This new travel literature gave Europeans sitting by their firesides a window into faraway lands where different-looking people resided in cultures that seemed exotic and strange.” These travel writers presented a false and exoticized impression of “different-looking people,” which was further distorted when ideas from travel writing were translated into more creative forms. Far from being mere entertainment, novels were an important method through which racist ideas were created and disseminated. As Kendi notes, the female novelist Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave “was the first English novel to repeatedly use terms like ‘White Men,’ ‘White People,’ and ‘Negro.’” In doing so, the novel had an enormous impact on the development of racist ideas.
However, low literacy rates among certain populations (such as poor Europeans in the 15th century and enslaved Africans in America) as well as lack of access to books meant that theater and cinema became crucial in disseminating racist ideas to mass audiences. Kendi observes that “With the English literacy rate low, many more British imaginations were churned by playwrights than by travel writers.” In the 20th century, the rise of cinema continued this trend. Due to its accessibility and popularity, film became a hugely influential vehicle for transmitting racist ideas. “In the same way that Tarzan became the primary medium through which Americans learned about Africa, Gone with the Wind became the primary medium through which they learned about slavery,” Kendi explains. Both Tarzan and Gone with the Wind were filled with harmful and inaccurate racist ideas, such as depicting Africans as “ape-like” and enslaved people as happily submissive to their subjugation.
While Kendi’s argument about how universities and media were crucial in spreading racist ideas is powerful, he also notes that they can be transformed into institutions that develop and distribute antiracist thought. Both Du Bois and Angela Davis worked as university professors, using their positions to develop innovative, complex anti-racist theory. Moreover, Davis was one of the leaders of the Black Power movement, in which students and activists demanded that anti-racist thought be legitimized in universities. This drastically transformed educational institutions in the U.S. and led to the founding of the first Africana studies departments, such as the one in which Kendi himself teaches.
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Media, Institutions, and the Transmission of Knowledge ThemeTracker
Media, Institutions, and the Transmission of Knowledge Quotes in Stamped from the Beginning
I was taught the popular folktale of racism, that ignorant and hateful people had produced racist ideas, and that these racist people had instituted racist policies. But when I learned the motives behind the production of many of America's most influentially racist ideas, it became quite obvious that this folktale, though sensible, was not based on a firm footing of historical evidence. Ignorance/hate→[JEK1]racist ideas→discrimination: this causal relationship is largely ahistorical. It has actually been the inverse relationship—racial discrimination led to racist ideas which led to ignorance and hate. Racial discrimination→racist ideas→ignorance/hate: this is the causal relationship driving America's history of race relations.
Actually, most of the leading Enlightenment intellectuals were producers of racist ideas and abolitionist thought.
All the vices attributed to Black people, from idleness to treachery to theft, were the “offspring of slavery,” Rush wrote. In fact, those unsubstantiated vices attributed to Black people were the offspring of the illogically racist mind. Were captives really lazier, more deceitful, and more crooked than their enslavers? It was the latter who forced others to work for them, treacherously whipping them when they did not, and stealing the proceeds of their labor when they did. In any case, Rush was the first activist to commercialize the persuasive, though racist, abolitionist theory that slavery made Black people inferior. Whether benevolent or not, any idea that suggests that Black people as a group are inferior, that something is wrong with Black people, is a racist idea.
Presenting slaveholders as evil, the literature challenged some racist ideas, such as the Black incapacity for freedom, yet at the same time produced other racist ideas, such as Africans being naturally religious and forgiving people, who always responded to whippings with loving compassion. The movement’s ubiquitous logo pictured a chained African, kneeling, raising his weak arms up to an unseen heavenly God or hovering White savior. Enslaved Africans were to wait for enslavers to sustain them, colonizationists to evacuate them, and abolitionists to free them.
The New York Times reported at the end of 1861 that enslaved Africans were “earnestly desirous of liberty.” The growing number of runaways proved that Confederate reports of contented captives was mere propaganda. This form of Black resistance—not persuasion—finally started to eradicate the racist idea of the docile Black person in northern minds.
Hate fueled the lynching era. But behind this hatred lay racist ideas that had evolved to question Black freedoms at every stage. And behind these racist ideas were powerful White men, striving by word and deed to regain absolute political, economic, and cultural control of the South.
Controlled by White philanthropists and instructors, Fisk was one of the nation’s preeminent factories of uplift suasion and assimilationist ideas. Du Bois consumed these ideas like his peers and started reproducing them when he became the editor of Fisk’s student newspaper, The Herald.
Blacks in the early twentieth century would joke that the first English word immigrants learned was “nigger.”
“North American negroes… in culture and language,” Boas said, were “essentially European.” Boas was “absolutely opposed to all kind of attempts to foster racial solidarity,” including among his own Jewish people. He, like other assimilationists, saw the United States as a melting pot in which all the cultural colors became absorbed together (into White Americanness). Ironically, assimilationists like Boas hated racial solidarity, but kept producing racist ideas based on racial solidarity.
The Talented Tenth’s attempt at media suasion was a lost cause from the start. While “negative” portrayals of Black people often reinforced racist ideas, “positive” portrayals did not necessarily weaken racist ideas. The “positive portrayals could be dismissed as extraordinary Negroes, and the “negative” portrayals could be generalized as typical. Even if the racial reformers managed to one day replace all “negative” portrayals with “positive portrayals in the mainstream media, then, like addicts, racists would then turn to other suppliers.
Beginning around 1940, Columbia anthropologist Ruth benedict, a student of Franz Boas, dropped the term “racism” into the national vocabulary. “Racism is an unproved assumption of the biological and perpetual superiority of one human group over another,” she wrote in Race: Science and Politics (1940). She excused her class of assimilationists from her definition, though […] As assimilationists took the helm of racial thought, their racist ideas became God’s law, nature’s law, scientific law, just like segregationist ideas over the past century. Assimilationists degraded and dismissed the behaviors of African people and somehow projected the idea that they were not racist, since they did not root those behaviors in biology, did not deem perpetual, spoke of historical and environmental causes, and argued that Blacks were capable of being civilized and developed.
And so, as much as the Civil Rights Act served to erect a dam against Jim Crow policies, it also opened the floodgates for new racist ideas to pour in, including the most racist idea to date: it was an idea that ignored the White head start, presumed that discrimination had been eliminated, presumed that equal opportunity had taken over, and figured that since Blacks were still losing the race, the racial disparities and their continued losses must be their fault. Black people must be inferior, and equalizing policies—like eliminating or reducing White seniority, or instituting affirmative action policies—would be unjust and ineffective. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 managed to bring on racial progress and the progression of racism at the same time.
In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently. We cannot—we dare not—let the Fourteenth Amendment perpetuate racial supremacy.
The campaign for California’s Proposition 209 ballot initiative displayed the progression of racist ideas in their full effect: its proponents branded antiracist affirmative action as discriminatory, named the campaign and ballot measure the “civil rights initiative,” evoked the “dream” of Martin Luther King Jr. in an advertisement, and put a Black face on the campaign.
Months into Obama’s presidency, the postracialists slammed down their new ground rules for race relations: Criticize millions of Black people whenever you want, as often as you want. That’s not racialism or racism or hate. You’re not even talking about race. But whenever you criticize a single White discriminator, that’s race-speak, that’s hate-speak, that’s being racist. If the purpose of racist ideas had always been to silence the antiracist resisters to racial discrimination, then the postracial line of attack may have been the most sophisticated silencer to date.
I am certainly not stating that generations of consumers of racist ideas have not been educated or persuaded to discard those racist ideas. But as Americans have discarded old racist ideas, new racist ideas have been constantly produced for their renewed consumption. That’s why the effort to educate and persuade away racist ideas has been a never-ending affair in America. That’s why educational persuasion will never bring into being an antiracist America.
