Throughout Stamped from the Beginning, Kendi highlights the fact that racist ideas are often deceptive, disingenuous, and even entirely illogical. There are several reasons for this. For one, racism contradicts the principles that people claim to live by (such as treating others as one wishes to be treated), which means that people often do not like to openly admit to them. Furthermore, racism itself doesn’t make logical sense, because it is a set of ideas rooted in a false belief about humanity (that one racial group is superior to another). As a result of all these factors, racist ideas are rarely expressed in a straightforward, logical manner—and this means that they can sometimes be difficult to detect or understand. By paying close attention to the covert (hidden or disguised), paradoxical, and illogical forms that racist ideas take, Kendi provides the clarity necessary to understand racism and work toward an antiracist mindset.
Perhaps the main reason why racism so often takes covert forms is because it contradicts the principles most people claim to live by—both throughout history and in the present. Perversely, the result has often been that people claim that their racist ideas are actually an expression of these principles. Throughout the book, Kendi points to people who disguise their racist ideas because these notions conflict with prevailing moral principles. These include the Christian principle of treating others as one wishes to be treated, the Enlightenment emphasis on the importance of freedom and equality for all, or the utilitarian idea that society should be organized in a way that benefits as many people as possible.
Of the five key figures whom Kendi bases the book around, almost all struggle with this issue of contradiction and hypocrisy—but none more so than Thomas Jefferson. In the section of the book on Jefferson, Kendi emphasizes that the president’s entire life and career was plagued by paradox: “As a holder of nearly two hundred people with no known plans to free them, Thomas Jefferson authored the heralded American philosophy of freedom. What did it mean for Jefferson to call ‘liberty’ an ‘inalienable right’ when he enslaved people?” Kendi provides no answer to this question, because the truth is that there never was one. People like Jefferson were not able to find a resolution to the enormous contradictions between the principles of freedom and equality that they claimed to live by and their racist ideas and actions.
Yet while some figures failed to acknowledge the contradiction between their racist position and their moral commitments, others attempted to smooth over this contradiction by claiming that racism was actually a manifestation of their moral commitments. Kendi points out that, both historically and in the present, very few people would explicitly acknowledge their own ideas as “racist.” Instead they use euphemisms: “God’s word, nature’s design, science’s plan, or plain old common sense.” Crucially, each of these euphemisms implies that racism is an expression of a certain set of principles—whether that be Christianity, science, or reason. Similarly, when racist ideas are put into practice, people have often justified this by saying it is a manifestation of moral principles, even when this patently untrue. Perhaps the best example is segregation, which operated according to the principle of “separate but equal.” As Kendi emphasizes, in reality segregation was very obviously “separate and unequal.”
Kendi suggests that one of the most troubling groups of people whose racist ideas conflicted with their stated moral principles were white abolitionists. These individuals—including William Lloyd Garrison, another of the central five figures whom Kendi bases the book around—often committed their entire lives to abolition, making significant sacrifices in the process. Yet while the abolitionist movement challenged some racist ideas, it also produced new ones of its own (including “Africans being naturally religious and forgiving people, who always responded to whippings with loving compassion”). Abolitionists did not acknowledge that there was a contradiction between the principles of freedom and equality they were upholding and the inaccurate stereotypes about Black people they were disseminating. Indeed, they claimed that disseminating these stereotypes was in the interest of racial equality—a clearly paradoxical argument.
Another reason why racist ideas usually take paradoxical and illogical forms is because racism is an inherently illogical way of thinking, not an accurate way of describing reality. Perhaps the most extreme examples of the paradoxical function of racist ideas occurred during slavery. As Kendi points out, it is difficult to imagine how it came to be that planters would sit and look out over the fields at enslavers forced to toil in extreme heat and call these enslaved people “lazy.” Yet bizarre as it may seem, the idea of Black people’s inherent laziness was one of the most commonly voiced racist ideas when slavery was legal in the U.S.
Furthermore, while the most exaggerated examples of the paradox of racism are rooted in slavery, Kendi emphasizes that racist ideas still operate according to this same illogic today. He notes that during Barack Obama’s presidency, Republicans and right-wing commentators frequently claimed that Obama was racist against white people. But Kendi points out that the president made negative statements about Black people far more often than he did about white people. Through analyzing examples like this, it becomes clear that paradox and illogic are part of how racist ideas work because people often don’t hold racist ideas because they think they are true—rather, they hold them because they want to hold them.
By understanding that racist ideas often take covert, paradoxical, and illogical forms, readers will be better able to identify racist ideas (including in their own thinking). This process can be difficult and painful, as almost no one would willingly admit to holding racist views. Yet because the way racism operates is so sneaky, it is even more vital that people learn to understand the veiled, indirect qualities of racist sentiments. It is only in this way that racist thinking can be properly confronted with antiracism.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Illogic of Racism ThemeTracker
The Illogic of Racism 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.
Planters responded to labor demands and laborers’ unity by purchasing more African people and luring Whiteness away from Blackness. In the first official recognition of slavery in Virginia, legislators stipulated, in 1660 (and in stricter terms in 1661), that any White servant running away “in company with any negroes” shall serve for the time of the “said negroes absence”—even if it meant life.
[…] whenever ethnic racism did set the natural allies on American plantations apart, in the manner that racism set the natural allies in American poverty apart, enslavers hardly minded. They were usually willing to deploy any tool—intellectual or otherwise—to suppress slave resistance and ensure returns on their investments.
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.
As a holder of nearly two hundred people with no known plans to free them, Thomas Jefferson authored the heralded American philosophy of freedom. What did it mean for Jefferson to call “liberty” an “inalienable right” when he enslaved people? It is hard to figure out what Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and indentured White servants meant when they demanded liberty in 1776. But what about Jefferson and other slaveholders like him, whose wealth and power were dependent upon their land and their slaves?
The ambitious politician, maybe fearful of alienating potential friends, maybe torn between Enlightenment antislavery and American proslavery, maybe honestly unsure, did not pick sides between polygenesists and monogenesists, between segregationists and assimilationists, between slavery and freedom. But he did pick the side of racism.
If Blacks did not violently resist, then they were cast as naturally servile. And yet, whenever they did fight, reactionary commentators, in both North and South, classified them as barbaric animals who needed to be caged in slavery. Those enslavers who sought comfort in myths of natural Black docility hunted for those whom they considered the real agitators: abolitionists like Garrison. Georgia went as far as offering a reward of $5,000 (roughly $109,000 today) for anyone who brought Garrison to the state for trial.
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.
Southern Blacks defended themselves in the war of re-enslavement, lifted up demands for rights and land, and issued brilliant antiracist retorts to the prevailing racist ideas. If any group should be characterized as “lazy,” it was the planters, who had lived in idleness on stolen labor,” resolved a Petersburg, Virginia, mass meeting. It had always been amazing to enslaved people how someone could lounge back, drink lemonade, and look out over the field, and call the bent-over pickers lazy. To the racist forecast that Blacks would not be able to take care of themselves, one emancipated person replied, “We used to support ourselves and our masters too when we were slaves and I reckon we can take care of ourselves now.”
And if poor Whites were “White trash,” then what were elite Whites? Black consumers of racist ideas had come to associate Whiteness with wealth and power, and education and slaveholding. Only through the “White trash” construction could ideas of superior Whiteness be maintained, as it made invisible the majority of White people, the millions in poverty, by saying they were not ordinary Whites: they were “White trash.” Similarly, the upwardly mobile Blacks were not really Black: they were extraordinary. At some point, racist and classist White elites started embracing the appellation to demean low-income Whites. “White trash” conveyed that White elites were the ordinary representatives of Whiteness.
Blacks in the early twentieth century would joke that the first English word immigrants learned was “nigger.”
Uplift suasion had been deployed for more than a century, and its effect in 1903? American racism may have never been worse. But neither its undergirding racist ideas, nor its historical failure, nor the extraordinary Negro construction ensuring its continued failure had lessened the faith of reformers. Uplift suasion had been and remained one of the many great White hopes of racist America.
“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.
The history of racist ideas tells us what strategies antiracists should stop using. Stamped from the Beginning chronicles not just the development of racist ideas, but the ongoing failure of the three oldest and most popular strategies Americans have used to root out these ideas: self-sacrifice, uplift suasion, and educational persuasion.
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.
