Stamped from the Beginning - by Ibram Kendi
Prologue
- U.S. Senate floor, April 1860, Jefferson Davis, "This Government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes...[but]...by white men for white men...the inequality of the white and black races [was] stamped from the beginning."
- racist idea: "any concept that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group in any way"
- segregationist racism: one racial group is superior or inferior by nature (forever and unconditionally)
- assimilationist racism: one racial group is superior or inferior by nurture (temporarily and conditionally)
- anti-racism (more effective term than "non-racism")
- "Each and every identifiable Black group has been subjected to what critical race theorist Kimberle Crenshaw has called "intersectionality" - prejudice stemming from the intersections of racist ideas and other forms of bigotry, such as sexism, classism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia."
- racist theory is born of active oppression and discrimination (i.e., racist policy); usually racial discrimination leads to racist ideas leads to ignorance/hate, not the other way around.
- Aristotle: "Humanity is divided into two: the masters and the slaves; or, if one prefers it, the Greeks and the Barbarians, those who have the right to command; and those who are born to obey."
- 1377, Ibn Kaldun, "The Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery...because [Negroes] have little that is human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals...same applies to the Slavs"
- 1453, Gomes Eanes De Zurara, The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, frames enslavement and trade as a Christian missionary venture
- 1516, Bartolome de Las Casas, campaigns against enslavement and abuse of Taino Native Americans and suggests importing enslaved Africans instead. Later, 1561, he regrets advising the king to do this.
- Comedias de Negros - Spanish dramatic genre, stamps Black people as cruel and stupid
- Shakepseare: Aaron from Titus Andronicus and Othello from Othello
- The Masque of Blackness, a play by Ben Jonson in honor of King James and Queen Anne (who performed in the play): twelve African princesses voyage to Britannia to be "made beautiful" by being turned white
- "race" as a word - usage grows in late 15th century and 16th century
- "climate theory" - skin color and racial characteristics are determined by climate
- "curse theory" - Africans are the cursed children of Ham (from story of Noah)
- 1655, Elizabeth Key, Virginia, a biracial enslaved Christian woman, whose white father had intended her manumission, successfully sues for her freedom. Virginia legislators respond, 1622, "all children borne in this country [derive their status from] the condition of the mother."
- Early American racial statements - already "individualizing White negativity and generalizing Black negativity."
- Boyle and Newton - White is the color of light
- 1664, Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory, "make it your chief end in buying and using slaves, to win them to Christ, and save their souls."
- John Locke, the child's unprejudiced understanding is as "white paper," also, "rasa tabula"
- Locke, "slaves, who being captives taken in a just war, are by the right of nature subjected to the absolute dominion and arbitrary power of their masters."
- 1688, Mennonite "Germantown Petition Against Slavery"
- 1676, Bacon and company, "liberty to all Servants and Negroes"
- 1684, Francios Bernier, becomes "first popular classifier of all humans into races"
- Cotton Mather, African souls are "as white and good as those of other nations, but are destroyed for lack of knowledge."
- Witch hunts in Massachusetts, the devil always portrayed as black
- 1696, Mather, A Good Master Well Served, husband over wife, parent over child, master over servant/slave
- Virginia, imposed compulsory slave patrols on non-slaveholding Whites
- Enslaved Africans branded as submissive, ignorant, needing a paternalistic master on the one hand, and violent, devious, needing a policing overseer on the other hand
- 1724, Hugh Jones, William and Mary, "Christianity encourages and orders [African people] to become more humble and better servants."
- 1745, Malachy Postlethwayt, defines the Bristish Empire as "a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power, on an African foundation"
- 1735, Carl Linnaeus, System Naturae, classifies four varieties of Homo Sapiens with Europeans at the top and Africans at the bottom
- Most leading Enlightenment intellectuals produce both racist ideas and abolitionist ideas
- Polygenesis - different species of humans, with different origins
- Monogenesis - single origin
- "mulatto" from "mulo/mule" branded as "cross-breed" that's "infertile" or has "bad blood"
- Phillis Wheatley, 1767, enslaved African American, talented scholar and writer, "The sable Land of error's darkest night," referring to Africa
- David Hume, 1753, "There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white"
- growing myth of the "extraordinary Negro;" an exception that proves the rule
- Ben Franklin complains to the British crown that it's enslaving Americans and making "American whites black"
- George Washington, when asked to sign an anti-slavery petition, replies, "It would be dangerous to make a frontal attack on a prejudice which is beginning to decrease"
- Thomas Jefferson, "Amalgamation with the other color, produces degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent"
- 1793, Fugitive Slave Act
- growing myth of "uplift suasion;" if Blacks act according to good white standards, racism will decrease
- Southern representatives and media claim that public discussion of slavery and the presence of free Blacks incite slaves to rebel
- Sarah Baartman is carted and displayed all over Europe as "The Hottentot Venus;" after her death her body is dissected and her bones, genitals, and brains displayed in museum
- Growth of colonization movement (mostly white); England starts colony "for" freed Blacks - Sierra Leone; later Monroe starts American version, Liberia
- TJ, "the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government"
- 1824 American Tract Society, mass producing images of Jesus, always white
- 1830s, urban penny press turns more and more "to eye-catching bad news, sensationalizing and connecting crime and Blackness and poverty"
- growth of blackface minstrel shows; Thomas "Daddy" Rice perfects the blackface character he calls, Jim Crow
- 1837, U.S. Senate floor, John Calhoun, "the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two [races], is, instead of an evil, a good - a positive good"
- 1839, Dr. Samuel Morton, Crania America, racism based on phrenology
- 1845, Alabama doctor J. Marion Sims experiments on enslaved Black women, becomes "father of modern gynecology"
- 1840s, Richmond, Tredegar begins using enslaved black workers in skilled positions; White workers go on strike; strikers are fired
- 1850, new Fugitive Slave Act
- "Plantation-school novels" respond to Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
- 1853, Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind, polygenesis
- 1857, Dred Scott v Sandford
- 1859, John Brown and interracial battalion capture armory at Harper's Ferry; Brown hailed in abolitionist circles as a martyr like no Black revolutionary had ever been
- 1864, Spencer coins "survival of the fittest," which later develops into "Social Darwinism"
- 1869, Galton, "nature verses nurture," claims that nature is undefeated. In 1883 urges governments toward "eugenics" to prevent "unselected peoples" from reproducing
- 1861, some propose 13th amendment that would "make slavery untouchable and potentially reunite the union"
- Alexander Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, "Cornerstone Speech," "upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth"
- 1861, thousands of enslaved Blacks run north, Union soldiers enforce Fugitive Slave Act during first months of the war; people later considered "contraband;" creation of "contraband camps" for escaped Blacks from the south; one out of four die in terrible conditions
- Lincoln, "my paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery"
- Maryland Unionist constitution sends "thousands of Black children into long-term indentures to their former masters, against their parents' objections"
- Black southerners: do not leave us landless! "do not force us to work for our former masters and call that freedom."
- Fed government sells over 90% of confiscated land to norther Whites
- May 1866, White mobs in Memphis kill 48 Black people, gang-rape Black women and destroy Black-owned property. Authorities blame Black provocation. First in a long line of "race riots" that kill mostly or exclusively Black people.
- Susan B. Anthony, "I would not trust [a Black man] with my rights; degraded, oppressed, himself, he would be more despotic...than ever our Saxon rulers are"
- 1867, Pres Andrew Johnson, "No independent government of any form has every been successful in [Black] hands
- 15th Amendment, no voting discrimination on basis of race; Democrats label it "as a 'nigger superiority bill' meant to establish horrific and barbaric Black supremacy"
- Reconstruction - millions given to railroad companies
- 1873, Colfax, Louisiana, Easter Sunday, 61 Blacks take refuge in courthouse and defend themselves, all killed.
- economic Panic of 1873, many driven into sharecropping
- 1875, Mississippi governor, Adelbert Ames, "a revolution is taking place - by force of arms - and a race are disenfranchised - they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom - an era of second slavery"
- 1876, carnage in Hamburg, South Carolina; Whites shout, "This is the beginning of the redemption of the South!"
- 1876, Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man, "proves" that non-Whites love to kill; initiates "criminology"
- Pres Grant privately tells his cabinet that giving Black men the ballot had been a mistake
- "Bargain of 1877" - Democrats peacefully concede defeat to Rutherford Hayes, while Hayes agrees to withdraw federal troops
- increased lynching in 1880's
- from 1889 to 1929, someone was lynched, on average, every four days
- 1883, Supreme Court declares Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional
- Henry Grady, editor of Atlanta Constitution, the "New South," "The friendliness that existed between the master and slave...has survived the war
- 1885, Grady, "The assortment of races is wise and proper, and stands on the platform of equal accommodations for each race but separate"
- 1885, Berlin Conference, European colonizers divide up Africa, claim to bring civilization
- 1890 Congressman William Connell introduces ex-slave pension bill, no traction
- National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, based in Nashville, TN
- Mississippi adopts anti-poor literacy test with an "understanding clause" which allows registrars to ask applicants to interpret something in the state constitution; the registrar gets to determine if the applicant "interpreted" correctly
- all other southern states follow suit, finding ways to restrict Black voters
- 1892, Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases, "only about a third of lynching victims had 'ever been charged with rape, to say nothing of those who were innocent of the charge'"
- 1892, Anna Julia Cooper, "[the Black woman] is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or unacknowledged factor in both"
- 1895, Booker T. Washington, "Atlanta Compromise," "He asked southern Whites to stop trying to push Blacks out of the house of America, and to allow them to reside comfortably in the basement - to help them rise up, knowing that when they rose, the whole house would rise"
- 1896, Plessy v Ferguson, upholds separate but equal
- Justice Brown, "If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them on the same plane"
- Justice Harlan, lone dissenter, "Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens"
- Frederick Hoffman, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, claims Blacks headed toward "gradual extinction"
- Racist laws target Blacks, leading to higher policing, arrests, and imprisonment in Black community, leading to labeling Blacks as criminal, leads to more arrests of Blacks, a vicious cycle of racist law leads to racist enforcement leads to more arrests leads to vindication of the law leads to more enforcement
- 1899, Rudyard Kipling, "Take up the White man's burden"
- 1901, George White, the last Black representative voted out of congress, "This Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the negroes' temporary farewell to the American Congress, but let me say, Phoenix-like he will rise up someday and come again"
- 1907, William Dunning, Reconstruction: Political and Economic, "All the forces that made for civilization were dominated by a mass of barbarous freedmen"
- 1918, Ulrich Phillips, American Negro Slavery, claims slavery was unprofitable, planters were paternalistic, and enslaved people were for the most part "robust, amiable, obedient and content"
- Thomas Dixon, Jr, author of "Reconstruction Trilogy" novels, romanticizes "oppression" of White planters during Reconstruction, "the awful suffering of the white man during the dreadful Reconstruction period...to demonstrate to the world that the white man must and shall be supreme"
- 1901, Pres Theodore Roosevelt invites Booker T. Washington to White House for dinner; South Carolina senator Ben "Pitchfork" Tillman responds, "The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again"
- 1906, Pres. Roosevelt, "The greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape"
- 1908, Jack Johnson wins heavyweight title; media cries for a "Great White Hope"
- 1912, Edgar Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes
- "With every Black first, the blame shifted to those who failed to break away"
- 1915, D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, Hollywood's first feature-length production, based on Dixon's novel The Clansmen: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan
- Pres Woodrow Wilson, after seeing Birth of a Nation, "It is like writing history with lighting...and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true"
- the Great Migration begins in earnest during WWI, over time "transforming Black America from a primarily southern population to a nation and urban one, and segregationist ideas became nationalized and urbanized in the process"
- 1916, Madison Grant, New York lawyer, The Passing of the Great Race, a detailed racial hierarchy, which Hitler later calls, "my Bible"
- 1919, the "Red Summer," the "deadliest series of White invasion of Black neighborhoods since Reconstruction"
- 1929, Claude Bowers, The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln, "Historians have shrunk from the unhappy tasks of showing us the torture chambers," i.e. southern Whites victims of Black Republicans
- Du Bois, the "wages of whiteness," wealth and opportunity accrued by whites over time due to discrimination against non-whites
- "Slave markets" - term for street corners in northern cities during the Depression where White employers could pick up cheapest possible labor
- 1932-1972, Tuskegee, Alabama, U.S. Public Health Service "Study of Syphilis in the Untreated Negro Male," promises free treatment to Black sharecroppers for "bad blood"; no informed consent; project secretly withholds treatment in order to study effects of syphili
- Home Owners Loan Corporation and Federal Housing Administration, parts of the New Deal, draw "color-coded" maps, institutionalizing housing discrimination
- 1938, Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, responding to a proposed anti-lynching bill, "If you succeed in the passage of this bill...raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousandfold, and upon you garments...will be the blood of the raped..."
- 1939, Gone with the Wind, based on Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer prize winning 1936 novel, surpasses The Birth of a Nation as the biggest box office hit to date
- Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, "a great majority of white people in America would be prepared to give the Negro a substantially better deal if they knew the facts"
- 1946, Senator Bilbo of Mississippi, "I call on every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the niggers away from the polls"
- racial reform a part of the "Truman Doctrine;" Pres Truman wants to brand America as "leader of the free world"
- 1947 Gallup poll, only 6% of White Americans think civil rights for Black Americans should be "secured immediately"
- Dixiecrats run as third party in opposition to Truman's civil rights agenda
- 1944, G.I. Bill helps veterans buy property, start a business, or go to college; Black veterans discriminated against
- 1953, Pres. Eisenhower, referring to Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, tells Chief Justice Warren he understands why southerners try to ensure "their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big black buck"
- 1954 Brown v Board decision, Justice Warren, "segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children"
- Massive Resistance, White Citizens Councils, re-energized KKK
- 1955 murder of Emmett Till
- 1957, E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, "Slavery was a cruel and barbaric system that annihilated the negro as a person"
- 1961, Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, becomes the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the civil rights movement
- 1958, George Wallace, after losing to Klan endorsed candidate for governor, "Well boys, no other son-of-a-bitch will ever outnigger me again"
- 1963, Wallace, "It is very appropriate that from this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us time and again down through history..."
- 1964, US Senate, 57 day filibuster against Civil Rights Act
- many opposing the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, after their passage, claim that they have ended discrimination and leveled the playing field
- many believe in race-based achievement gap
- 1960, Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative, claims welfare turns a "self-reliant spiritual being into a dependent animal creature without his knowing it" (at what point was Goldwater ever self-reliant?)
- 1965, Malcom X killed, New York Times headline, "The Apostle of Hate is Dead"
- "minority" and "ghetto" as a name for Negro or Black
- "...just as sexists could only envision male or female supremacy, northern and southern racists could only envision White or Black supremacy"
- 1967, National Welfare Right Association sits-in at chambers of Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Russel Long calls them "Black Brood Mares, Inc."
- MLK "economic bill of rights"
- many Black and White accept "the racist idea of the emasculated Black man, an idea popularized by the ever-popular Moynihan Report of 1965"
- Kerner Commision, in response to race riots across country, "What white Americans have never fully understood - but what the Negro can never forget - is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and what society condones it"
- 1968 Gallup poll, 81% of Americans believe in Nixon's slogan, "Law and order has broken down in the country"
- 1969, Gov Ronald Regan fires Angela Davis from UCLA for being a "communist;" later that year Cal. court rules the anti-Communist regulation unconstitutional
- 1971, Griggs v Duke Power Co.
- 1973, Black poverty lowest level
- 1972, fewer than 350,000 people in prison
- 1976, Rocky, the Great White Hope
- 1966, Regan campaign, "send the welfare bums back to work"
- 1974, Regents v Bakke, strikes down UC Davis med school rule that sets-aside 16 out of 100 slots for "disadvantaged" non-White applicants
- 1971-1980, Klan triples membership
- 1980, Philadelphia, Mississippi, Regan running for Pres, "restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them"
- 1982, Regan introduces "War on Drugs," focuses on policing and arrests, higher sentences and deterent/punitive tactics; this strategy is continued in earnest by Bush and Clinton; arrests and prison population skyrocket
- Regan claims, "put drug abuse on the run through stronger law enforcement"
- 1987, McCleskey v Kemp, the "racially disproportionate impact" of death penalty does not justify overturning death sentence of McClesky
- 1994, Pres Clinton, "three strikes and you're out," works with Congress to pass Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act; billions of dollars to enforcement and prisons; majority of arrests continue to be non-violent drug offenses; mass incarceration
- 1996, California voters ban affirmative action
- Newt Gingrich, "Racism will not disappear by focusing on race"
- "Color-blind"
- Oakland Unified School District recognizes Ebonics as a language derived from West-African languages and English; many people, Black and White, freak out about this (I actually remember this)
- 2011, Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention, "Race is not a biological category that is politically charged...It is a political category that has been disguised as a biological one"
- 2003, No Child Left Behind, demands standardized testing and encourages de-funding of schools that don't meet standards
- 2005, Hurricane Katrina, took 3 days for rescue troops to arrive, longer than it took to deploy troops "to quell the 1992 Rodney King rebellion"
- "From 'civilizers' to standardized-testers, assimilationists have rarely confessed to racism"
- Sen Joe Biden, "He [Obama] is the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy"
- folk-theories of Black cultural inferiority, "legacy of defeat," "post-traumatic slave syndrome," "Hood Disease," "lack of personal responsibility"
- Birtherism, Pres Obama under "searing nativity microscope"
- "The Great Recession reduced the median annual Black household income by 11 percent, compared to 5 percent for Whites."
- "Defending racist policy by belittling Black folk: that had been the vocation of producers of racist ideas for nearly six centuries"
- "a myth continuously produced and reproduced by racists and antiracists alike: that racism materially benefits the majority of White people, that White people would not gain in the reconstruction of an antiracist America...It is not coincidental that slavery kept the vast majority of southern Whites poor. It is not coincidental that more White Americans thrived during the antiracist movements from the 1930s to the 1970s than ever before or since...."
- "Individual Blacks are not race representatives. They are not responsible for those Americans who hold racist ideas."
- "Racist ideas have always been the public relations arm of the company of racial discriminators and their products: racial disparities."
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