In Stamped from the Beginning, Kendi argues that the very concepts of Blackness and whiteness, not just notions of Black inferiority, should be seen as racist. Because the ideas of a Black race and a white race are so deeply ingrained into society, it might seem like they have existed forever. However, as Kendi shows, these ideas have a specific history. Crucially, the concepts of Blackness and whiteness were invented to justify and intensify colonization, slavery, and white supremacy—racial categories are inextricable from this history. As a result, Blackness and whiteness are not neutral concepts that only become harmful when they are put to hateful or ignorant uses. Rather, the invention of race was itself inherently racist. However, this doesn’t mean that people should pretend that race and racism don’t exist. Instead, Kendi argues, it is crucial that people understand how and why the ideas of Blackness and whiteness were invented in order to properly commit themselves to antiracism.
Kendi notes that throughout history, people have held prejudiced views about those of differing ethnicity, religious faith, or tribal affiliation. However, it was only in the early modern period (when the book begins) that the overarching ideas of a white race and a Black race were invented. It was during this time that Europeans were colonizing other parts of the globe, thieving land and resources and forcing indigenous peoples into indentured servitude and slavery. In order to justify these actions, Europeans began developing racist ideas about the indigenous people they were hurting and exploiting. Crucially, this involved collapsing many different ethnicities, tribes, religions, and languages into a single category (such as “savage” or “Negro”). Although this happened all over the world, it was most intensely enacted in Africa.
Kendi shows that from the beginning, the concept of “race” was dehumanizing: “The word race first appeared in Frenchman Jacques de Brézé’s 1481 poem ‘The Hunt,’ where it referred to hunting dogs. As the term expanded to include humans over the next century, it was used primarily to identify and differentiate and animalize African people.” Dehumanizing African people by viewing them as akin to animals made European colonizers and enslavers feel as if they no longer had a moral duty toward them. Indeed, viewing African people as animal-like specifically justified selling them into slavery, as enslaved people were given a status equivalent to farm animals. In essence, slaves were treated as commodities, valued solely for their ability to perform agricultural labor that profited their “owners.”
It was during the slavery era that the ideas of Blackness and whiteness became more solid. They were concepts that were produced by slavery but could also exist outside it—which meant that once slavery ended, these harmful concepts remained. In order for slavery to work, there needed to be a clear and absolute distinction drawn between enslaved and non-enslaved people. This was a particular concern for wealthy enslavers who feared that poor white laborers would come to perceive themselves as having more in common with enslaved Black people than wealthy white people. As a result, “Planters responded to labor demands and laborers’ unity by purchasing more African people and luring Whiteness away from Blackness.” This “luring” involved, for example, instituting extremely harsh punishments on white people who collaborated or fraternized with Black people.
In order to justify and solidify Black people’s status as natural slaves, white Americans developed stereotypes that connected the idea of Blackness to dehumanization and enslavement. For example, white people characterized Black people as naturally strong and sturdy and thus able to withstand the unbearable forced labor to which they were subjected. Similarly, white people came to characterize Black women as hypersexual and sexually aggressive. This was a way of justifying white men’s frequent (and legally sanctioned) rape of Black women by shifting blame onto these women themselves. As a result, Blackness came to be associated with a long list of negative and dehumanized traits. This association was so strong that it outlasted slavery, and it continues to affect the way people view Blackness in the present.
Kendi shows that the invention of Blackness and whiteness wasn’t just about developing negative, dehumanized ideas about Black people; it was also about developing an idea of whiteness as good, pure, and naturally supreme. Associating whiteness with goodness also began in Europe. Kendi notes, “Normalizing negative behavior in faraway African people allowed writers to de-normalize negative behavior in White people, to de-normalize what they witnessed during intense appraisals of self and nation.” Writers began rhetorically associating whiteness with goodness, so that even when English writers described Black people in supposedly positive terms, they would describe their “white” souls or the “whites” of the eyes.
Kendi notes that the phrase “white trash”—even though it superficially appears to convey a negative stereotype about white people—is actually another way of upholding the idea that white supremacy is normal and correct. The phrase inadvertently maintains ideas of white superiority by suggesting that whiteness usually connotes elite status, dignity, and wealth. This obscures the reality that most white people in the U.S. are not especially wealthy and are also oppressed by the elite minority of affluent, powerful individuals.
Kendi shows that the racist invention of Blackness and whiteness far outlasted colonization and slavery, maintaining a grip on people’s psychology to this day. However, he also illustrates many ways in which anti-racists have fought against the psychological hold of these concepts. At the 1965 Race and Colour Conference in Copenhagen, for example, “Scholars pointed out everyday phrases like ‘black sheep,’ ‘blackballing,’ ‘blackmail,’ and ‘blacklisting,’ among others, that had long associated Blackness and negativity.” Drawing awareness to the ways in which Blackness has historically been given negative connotations helps people understand how they might have internalized these ideas and work toward reorienting their minds away from racist concepts.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Invention of Blackness and Whiteness ThemeTracker
The Invention of Blackness and Whiteness Quotes in Stamped from the Beginning
All in all, ethnic and religious and color prejudice existed in the ancient world. Constructions of races—White Europe, Black Africa, for instance—did not, and therefore racist ideas did not. But crucially, the foundations of race and racist ideas were laid. And so were the foundations for egalitarianism, antiracism, and antislavery laid in Greco-Roman antiquity.
Normalizing negative behavior in faraway African people allowed writers to de-normalize negative behavior in White people, to de-normalize what they witnessed during intense appraisals of self and nation.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
