Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

Kendi begins this chapter with the story of Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved female poet put on trial in 1772. Taught to read by her owner, Susanna Wheatley, Phillis began to write poems. Many of these poems, like “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” “[marveled] at her assimilation” and “[attacked] segregationist curse theory” (93). The most “black exhibit” in Revolutionary America, Phillis Wheatley was made to testify that she wrote the poems, which were taken up by abolitionist movements of the time. Though she could defend their content, Kendi writes, “no American publisher was willing to alienate slaveholding consumers by publishing” her work (94).

Assimilationists during the Enlightenment period had sought out “exotic creatures” to train as examples of “Black capacity for Whiteness” (95). John Montagu, an English nobleman, invested significant money to fund the education of dark-skinned intellectuals. Despite these examples, influential philosopher David Hume continued to present segregationist ideas in his “popular critique of climate theory” (95). Though Hume “strongly opposed slavery,” he also did not see his assertion that black individuals are by nature inferior to whites as contradictory (96). Nonetheless, Kendi writes, proslavery factions in coming generations drew on his writings to defend the practice of slavery.

Though “some segregationists began to accept assimilationist ideas and even oppose slavery” in Revolutionary America, Kendi writes that very few Americans “rejected racist thinking altogether” (96). Ben Franklin, who welcomed successful black students to his school, could only concede black students’ ability to learn; he stated that, generally, slaves had negative dispositions and capacities for intellectual achievement. The “strategy of exhibiting excelling Blacks to change racist minds” failed, Kendi writes, because it held up the excellent black student as exceptional (97).

In 1773, a University of Pennsylvania professor named Benjamin Rush “was the first activist to commercialize the persuasive, though racist, abolitionist theory that slavery made Black people inferior” (98). Though “Rush whacked down curse theory” and pushed against theological defenses of slavery, Kendi notes that “any idea that suggests that Black people as a group are inferior” is still racist, even if written benevolently (98). Rush’s work nonetheless became central to the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, founded in 1774 as America’s first non-African antislavery society.

Wheatley’s poems gained popularity through Rush’s work and through their circulation in England. She traveled to London in 1773 to find a publisher, and champions of black intellectuals helped her work to travel. Even Voltaire, “who a few years prior had not been able to decide whether Blacks had developed from monkeys, or monkeys had developed from Blacks,” was convinced of her excellence (99). Still, and especially in America, Kendi shares examples of public and published backlash against Rush’s and Wheatley’s work.

While Wheatley’s words traveled, Thomas Jefferson was caught up in the construction of his own plantation, Monticello. Building on anti-English sentiment, Jefferson published a tract that “blamed England for American slavery” (100). But “the British (and some Americans) immediately began questioning the authenticity of a slaveholder throwing a freedom manifesto at the world” (100). Abolitionist and antiracist waves took hold among enslaved people themselves, in less ironic expressions that Jefferson’s.

In response, a plantation owner in Jamaica named Edward Long, and Lord Kames, a Scottish judge, both published 1774 treatises that “breathed new life into polygenesis” (101). Though “Christian monogenesists bristled at the blasphemy” of separate human creation stories, it “started making sense to more and more people” as a way to understand race (101).

During the American Revolution, “a full-blown debate on the origins of humans” took hold (102). “American intellectuals” followed active debates in Europe, “with American enslavers and secular intellectuals” behind Kames and “abolitionists and theologians” behind Kant (102). Everyone, though, united against the English, calling the British enslavers and eschewing their authority. Samuel Johnson, in England, despised this anti-authoritarian attitude from a group who depended on slavery. He pushed back against Jefferson’s assertion that British rule made “American whites black” (103).

This chapter describes the writing and application of the Declaration of Independence. In response to Europeans’ view of Americans as inferior, Thomas Jefferson boldly drafted into the document the phrase that “all Men are created equal” (104).

Kendi explains that no one knows the subtleties of Jefferson’s intentions, but that it’s clear “he never believed that antiracist creed that all human groups are equal” (104). Even as he “authored the heralded American philosophy of freedom,” he held “nearly two hundred people with no known plans to free them” (105). In Kendi’s explanation, “for Jefferson, power came before freedom,” and “power creates freedom, not the other way around” (105).

At the time, tens of thousands of enslaved Africans ran away from slavery in the southern states. Jefferson “criminalized runaways in the declaration of independence,” negating these enslaved peoples’ readings that they could claim their own freedom (106). His exclusion of women and Native Americans also stirred significant discontent. Most of the document was oriented toward imagining an economy freed from the dominance of England. Jefferson admired Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.

Jefferson persisted in the analogy that Britain enslaved America, even arguing that Britain armed enslaved people in America to fight for its own cause. But Puritan and Quaker antiracists like Samuel Hopkins found the two forms of “enslavement” to be incomparably different. Hopkins “sat lonely on the pew of antislavery in 1776,” because most Americans were willing to perpetuate Jefferson’s contradictory argument to serve self-interest (107). The American Revolution was in full swing.

Kendi skips forward to the final moments of the Revolutionary War, when the British sought Jefferson, in hiding at Monticello, at the capitol in Richmond. In 1781, while in hiding, Jefferson responded to a French diplomat’s twenty-three questions for America’s leaders with a book called Notes on the State of Virginia. In the text, Jefferson presented a “hodgepodge” of opinions on black people, which were at once antislavery, anti-abolition, segregationist, and antiracist, according to Kendi (108).

George Washington had a different take on the antislavery movement. He claimed that some “racial progress” had begun and, when it developed, the time would come for antislavery action (109). His was “one of the first drumbeats of supposed racial progress to drown out the passionate arguments of antiracism” (109).

In Notes, Jefferson did present a plan for ending slavery and following it with “mass schooling” and “colonization of Africans back to Africa” (109). He waxed eloquent on, and became “the preeminent American authority on,” “Black intellectual inferiority” (109). Jefferson’s constant contradictions, which Kendi tracks, leave readers unable to decipher his true thoughts about race; clarity was “lacking when it came to racial conceptions” (111). The only side that he clearly picked was “the side of racism” (111).

Following the death of his wife in 1782, Jefferson took on a diplomatic post in Paris. There, without his permission, a publisher translated Notes into French and published it in 1786. In response, Jefferson “arranged for an English edition to be released in London” in 1787 (112). This text was “the most consumed American nonfiction book until well into the nineteenth century” (112).

While Jefferson was in France, a theologian named Samuel Stanhope Smith delivered an oration that reaffirmed climate theory to the American Philosophical Society. Smith’s discussion established proximity to Whiteness as a way to learn sophistication; it also established “European features as the standard of measurement” of beauty, and biracial people as a cut above black people (114). Slavery, then, “had substantially improved the African condition” (115). His tract, which reaffirms polygenesis, was circulated across the world and reprinted. Smith became famous and went on to become the president of Princeton University.

Smith lectured delegates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, the events of which Jefferson paid attention to from Paris. At this convention, the famous “three-fifths” rule, which “[equated] enslaved Blacks to three-fifths of all other (White persons)” for purposes of taxation “matched the ideology of racists on both sides of the aisle” (116). To some degree, Kendi writes, “all embraced Black inferiority” (116). In a small gain, the constitution promised to abandon the slave trade in twenty years, despite that only two states continued to import slaves at the time.

Kendi notes that Jefferson, while in Paris, began a sexual relationship with 14-year-old Sally Hemings, an enslaved biracial girl who accompanied his young daughter, Polly, abroad. Though Jefferson had claimed that black women were of inferior beauty, and though he “had always assailed interracial relationships between White women and Black or biracial men,” he began relations with Hemings (117). Though he later saw his own “hypocrisy” (117), he “hid his actual views in the privacy of his mind and bedroom” (118).

In France, Hemings petitioned for her own freedom and that of her “at least five and possibly as many as seven children” that Jefferson fathered (118). He kept her enslaved, but he did “[keep] his word and freed their remaining children when they reached adulthood” (118).

Kendi ends the chapter by noting the Haitian Independence that bloomed in 1790 in response to the French Revolution and its Declaration of the Rights of Man. Jefferson enjoyed watching the French Revolution. But the Haitian Independence movement was “a civil war that no slaveholder […] wanted enslaved Africans to win” (119). 

Amid battles in Haiti between freed people and those French people who would re-enslave them, Kendi raises the case of an educated, free black man named Benjamin Banneker. Though “as soon as [free blacks] shook off slavery’s shackles, the shackles of discrimination clamped down on them,” Banneker was lucky to have fertile property and time to read and write (120). Banneker wrote to Thomas Jefferson, who was by then leader of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and a prominent mind in Congress.

At the time, Benjamin Franklin was at the heart of congressional debates on slavery. Though he spoke out against slavery in Congress in 1790, just before his death, he still called blacks inferior to “the common standard of the human species” (121). After his death in April of that year, Congress continued to fight about the character of black people, both free and enslaved, but they were united in passing the 1790 Naturalization Act, “which limited citizenship to ‘free white persons’ of ‘good character’” (121). This congressional debate carried over into the rest of society. Abolitionists like Charles Crawford, Moses Brown, and Benjamin Rush continued to furnish “exhibits” of intellectually-trained black people (122).

When Banneker wrote to Jefferson, both men were “in the middle of these debates” (122). Banneker pointed out the contradiction of slaveholders speaking out about their own oppression. His “staunchly antiracist” letter confronted “the young country’s leading disseminator of racist ideas” (122). In response, Jefferson sent a “standard reply” that “sidestepped his contradiction” (122). Though Banneker could not persuade Jefferson to admit that he was wrong, Jefferson did note that Banneker was “an exceptional Negro,” breaking with his previous line that black people could not think at a high level (123).

In the face of the Haitian Revolution, however, Banneker’s words did not hold much sway. In 1793, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, “bestowing slaveholders the right and legal apparatus to recover escaped Africans and criminalize those who harbored them” (123). Jefferson himself was deeply troubled by the event. This trouble grew when a ship of masters and slaves, arrived from Haiti, brought “the contagion of yellow fever” to Philadelphia (123).

Despite the measures intended to protects slaveholders, abolitionism expanded in the 1790s, with more freed blacks and a declining number of slaves in the North. Discourse on race increasingly began to address “how Black people used their freedom” (123). Abolitionists, hoping to help, developed a strategy of “uplift suasion,” which “was based on the idea that White people could be persuaded away from their racist ideas if they saw Black people improving their behavior, [and] uplifting themselves from their low station in American society” (124). This had been and would continue to be an important strategy that abolitionists pressed upon blacks. In Kendi’s words, this strategy “[believed] that the negative ways of Black people were responsible for racist ideas,” and bought into “notions of Black inferiority” (125).

Though this racist idea was “impossible for Blacks to execute” because they were viewed as categorically inferior, it “seemed to be working in the 1790s” (125). Some “consumers of racist ideas” changed their minds when they saw, as Jefferson did, an “exceptional” black person (125). But “upwardly mobile Blacks” also drew criticism, for “when Black people rose, racists either violently knocked them down or ignored them as extraordinary” (125).

Benjamin Rush, the abolitionist, was also a doctor, and was charged with treating the yellow fever outbreak. Again showing the racist beliefs undergirding his political stance, Rush suggested that black people were immune to yellow fever, “a conclusion he reached based on his belief in their animal-like physical superiority” (126). Thousands of black nurses died.

Elsewhere in the scientific community, Eli Whitney, in 1794, secured a patent for the cotton gin. In the coming years, the machine “made the value of southern lands skyrocket and quickly dethroned rice and tobacco” (126). The boom demanded slave labor, and “uplift suasion had no chance of dethroning King Cotton” (127).

As yellow fever took over, and as the cotton gin began to change the industry, particular case studies continued to complicate discourse on race. A black man with vitiligo named Henry Moss “exhibited his forty-two-year-old whitened body in Philadelphia taverns” as a kind of thought experiment. Though “Moss was a freak to some,” to others, “he was the future of racial progress” (127). Jefferson, who enslaved some albino people, did not join with “physical assimilationists,” though “other American intellectuals did take whitening Blacks very seriously” (128). Rush developed a pseudoscientific theory that black skin and hair were a disease, like leprosy.

Abolitionists, though enamored with racist ideas like leprosy theory or climate theory, nonetheless despised Jefferson. Media energy built on this negative feeling when one reporter, James Callender, who had used his position to defend Jefferson during the 1796 election, used Jefferson’s affair to spite him. Callender’s words did not hurt Jefferson politically, though, as they “did not surprise many White male voters” (129).

“Master/slave sex,” as Kendi calls it, both “fundamentally acknowledged the humanity of Black and biracial women” and “reduced that humanity to their sexuality” (130). This was a norm of the period. Two years after Callender’s articles, Jefferson won the 1804 election, and “King Cotton was on the march” (131). Black revolutions across the Americas inspired overarching fear among whites. “With so much money to make,” Kendi notes, “antislavery and antiracist ideas were whipped to the side like antislavery, antiracist Africans” (132).

This new energy cast aside theological and assimilationist ideas about race. With religious explanations on the wane, the ideas of blacks as a separate species took hold. Not only were whites a superior group, but they were a separate race. Samuel Stanhope Smith tried to revive the religious standpoint of monogenesis, drawing on the example of Henry Moss. But by 1810, Smith’s release date, Jefferson, who was largely responsible for abandoning religious considerations in politics, “had retired from public life” (134). 

The first event Kendi discusses in this chapter is the 1807 Slave Trade Act, which sought to punish the cruelty of illegal slave traders. Though the act made Jefferson feel good, “it was an empty and mostly symbolic law” (136). The domestic slave trade continued to flourish, supported by laws like the one passed in South Carolina that decided “enslaved women had no legal claims on their children” (136). Ending the international slave trade only helped to raise the value of a slaveowner’s captives.

Black people’s bodies grew increasingly more valuable. In Europe, Sarah Baartman, a woman from a nomadic, non-Bantu African group in southwestern Africa, was a freak-show attraction who was given the stage name Hottentot Venus. Baartman’s “buttocks and genitals were irregularly large among her fellow Khoi women” and African women as a whole, but they “were presented as regular and authentically African” (137). This “tightened the bolt” linking Africans to enlarged genitalia (137).

Anatomist Georges Cuvier, “a rare segregationist who rejected polygenesis,” wanted to study Baartman (138). Though she refused to disrobe in his lab, after Baartman died in 1815, Cuvier “secured her corpse” and disrobed, measured, opened, and examined her body (139). Kendi calls this a “scientific rape” (139). He concluded that the Khoi people “were more closely related to the ape than to the human” (139). Parts of her body were on display until 1974, and only repatriated to South Africa in 2002.

Kendi describes the massive slave revolt, in 1811, against slaveholders in Louisiana. The US Army quashed the rebellion, and Louisiana gave reparations to pay for the cost of killed captives. Wealthy planters in Louisiana, acquired from Napoleon in 1803, voted to join the union in 1812 to gain protection against future rebellions. This added another “slave state” to the union (140), and the slave trade continued to proliferate.

When Jefferson left Washington in 1809, he retired to his vast property, leaving behind an accelerating slave economy. He became a “celebrity scholar” during the next decade, devoting himself to science (142). He “also lost all drive to support the cause of antislavery” and used “the excuse of old age” (142). He advised to “only promote emancipation in a way that did not offend anyone,” a philosophy that, Kendi writes, “was about to be adopted by a new generation” (142). 

Kendi begins this chapter by describing a planned rebellion in 1800. Gabriel and Nancy Prosser organized “as many as 50,000 rebels” to desert plantations and take over Richmond, Virginia, but they were betrayed by “two cynical slaves” (143). Army forces quelled the rebellion.

In the wake of this rebellion, slaveowners spread the word that “a rebellious slave was ordinary—real, but not really representative” (144). White Virginians continued, though, to press for weapons and laws that would protect them. They worked with Jefferson, in 1802, to seek space in Africa, including in Sierra Leone, (then an English colony) for freed people, where they might send “persons […] [d]angerous to the peace of society” (144).

Lawmakers kept this failed plan a secret, but in 1816, Charles Fenton Mercer discovered documents suggesting this solution and “was inspired” by the plan to send black people overseas (144). Mercer was antislavery and anti-abolitionist, and he hoped to see a free-labor economy grow in the region, but as he watched labor revolts overseas, he felt that social discrimination would make “free Blacks into a perpetually rebellious working class” (145). Shipping them overseas, then, seemed “like a godsend” (145).

Mercer joined with Robert Finley, who was an antislavery clergyman. Finley wrote a manifesto for the colonization movement, titled Thoughts on the Colonization of Free Blacks, in 1816. He brought the tract to Washington that year, to lobby policymakers who, like Jefferson, believed that blacks “were incapable of achieving Whiteness in the United States” (145). The movement picked up speed, with powerful men like Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson joining on. With more slaveholders present, though, “the demands of the slaveholders” dominated the conversation (146).

Meanwhile, 3,000 black men gathered at a church in Philadelphia to discuss the formation of the American Colonization Society. Not one man supported the idea; only four church leaders, interested in colonization’s “missionary potential,” would affirm it (146). Most men “had received their knowledge of Africa and their racist ideas from White Americans,” and they did not want to revisit the mythical land of “savage” Africa (147).

The major blocks for the colonization movement were that “slaveholders would never accept colonization unless they were convinced that it would allow slavery to endure” and that “Free Blacks would never sign on unless emancipation was promised” (148). Nevertheless, “the society was persistent” (148). For around $300, President Monroe’s representative bought a strip of coastal land in 1821, south of Sierra Leone, which he named Liberia. But “between 1820 and 1830,” Kendi notes, “only 154 Black northerners out of more than 100,000 sailed to Liberia” (149).

Still, slave owners supported colonization, especially as slave rebellions continued to occur. Kendi writes of a planned 1822 rebellion in Charleston, South Carolina, organized by well-traveled and educated church leader Denmark Vesey. Vesey’s plot was betrayed by Peter Prioleau, a house slave who was later freed and became a slaveowner himself. At this point, southerners began to actively produce proslavery treatises intended to espouse and enhance separations between blacks and whites.

Politicians like Jefferson were more focused, at the time, on the question of whether Missouri would allow enslaved Africans when it became a state. Though the 1820 Missouri Compromise admitted Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state, the debate surrounding this decision had Jefferson convinced of an imminent “civil war that could become a racial war” (151).

Neutral Jefferson, who Kendi calls “the nation’s most famous antislavery anti-abolitionist,” hoped that the Louisiana Territory could become “the place where the illnesses of the original states,” like slavery, “could be cured” (151). Moving the slaves to Louisiana would solve the problem. Mostly, he wanted to leave slavery out of Congress and allow southerners to “solve the problem of slavery at their own pace” (152). Though Jefferson, in the autobiography he wrote before his death, made clear his “antislavery credentials,” he also held that “nature, habit, [and] opinion [have] […] indelible lines of distinction between them” (152). Ultimately, he supported colonization in order to ease this tension.

Ralph Gurley, elected American Colonization Society Secretary in 1825, connected the colonization movement to the Protestant movement, just as the Second Great Awakening was getting underway. Appropriating a usually-Catholic instinct to produce images of the holy, Protestant groups began to produce pictures of Jesus, depicting him, always, as white.

Northern states were especially amenable to the fast-spreading colonization movements, as “northern race relations had grown progressively worse” with riots, runaways, and uplift suasion complicating White attitudes toward Blacks (154). But free blacks resisted colonization and pressed hard on “the idea of uplift suasion” (154). Adopting the name “Negro” in place of “African” was part of the effort to avoid being sent to Africa (154). America’s first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, worked to establish “respectable” black identity in the publication. But this often came with class judgments, and “class racism dotted the pages” of the publication (155). Eventually, the publication disbanded over the issue of colonization.

The black opinion meant little to the well-funded Colonization Society. While Jefferson stayed clear of the group, they had no trouble thriving. Still, Jefferson privately expressed his belief in the cause. In 1825, Jefferson became ill, and in 1826, he passed away, his last visitor “the half-brother of future Confederate general Robert E. Lee” (157). Jefferson died deep in debt, about which no one knew, and surrounded by the “Black faces” he called to his bedside (158).