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Chapter 14
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Stamped, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism vs. Antiracism
History and the Present
Power, Profit, and Privilege
How Racist Ideas Spread
Summary
Analysis
Everyone has heard of W. E. B. Du Bois, but not everyone knows his story. Growing up in Massachusetts, he faced discrimination and decided that he had to outdo the white kids. He studied at the historically Black Fisk University, then got his PhD at Harvard.
Like the other Black leaders and activists who figure prominently throughout Stamped, W. E. B. Du Bois first distinguished himself and learned to make sense of his own personal experiences with racism through education. This underlines Kendi and Reynolds’s point that learning about history is one of the best ways for young people to understand racism today.
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But even with his fancy education, Du Bois mostly learned racist ideas. He thought that Black people were naturally unintelligent, but that he was an exception because he was biracial. He even blamed Black people for getting lynched—and so did other activists, like Booker T. Washington and even Frederick Douglass. The journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett proved them wrong by showing that most Black lynching victims weren’t even charged with a crime, not to mention convicted of one.
Since John Cotton and Richard Mather enshrined Harvard’s racist ideas in Harvard’s curriculum, it’s no great surprise that Du Bois learned the same ideas there centuries later. Unfortunately, then, while his education helped him understand history and racism in the U.S., it gave him the wrong kind of ideas about them—this again underlines the need for accurate, antiracist education today. Du Bois imbibed a mix of segregationist ideas—like the idea that Black people are naturally unintelligent—and assimilationist ideas—like the idea that Black people could improve themselves by “whitening” the race and the idea that lynching victims deserved their fate because of their bad behavior. These ideas let him view himself as better than other Black people—like all racist ideas, they were ultimately self-serving.
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Meanwhile, Booker T. Washington was Black America’s other main leader. He told Black people to accept jobs like farming and physical labor, since he thought that would please white people. He was an assimilationist, just like Du Bois, but they weren’t friends. Du Bois was an intellectual, while Washington was a “man of the people.” In his popular book Up from Slavery, Washington thanked white people for “saving” Black people from slavery, which Du Bois couldn’t stand. In his own famous book, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois explored Black people’s “double consciousness”—they see themselves as Black but also as American. He argued that the best Black people, or the “Talented Tenth,” would help win white people’s approval.
But then, in 1906, an anthropologist named Franz Boas changed Du Bois’s mind. He taught Du Bois about African history and showed him that Black people actually aren’t naturally inferior to white people. Later that year, President Theodore Roosevelt angered his Black supporters by kicking a group of prominent Black soldiers out of the army. Booker T. Washington was one of Roosevelt’s biggest supporters, so Black people also turned against him—and toward Du Bois.
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