Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

Jason Reynolds wrote the body chapters of the book, so the narrative voice changes from Kendi to Reynolds in Chapter 1. He starts by affirming for the reader that the book is “not a history book” (1). Rather, it’s “a book that contains history” (1) and is most essentially about the present. The history in the book explains how the present came to be.

That history begins in Europe in the 15th century when soon-to-be global colonizers—Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands, France, Britain, and Italy in their monarchical forms—began to interact with and characterize Africans. Reynolds explains that the enslavers participated in standing traditions of human captivity and sale, but he stresses the novelty of a man named Gomes Eanes de Zurara who defended the African slave trade through literature. In The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, Zurara depicted African peoples as animalistic savages, launching the “recorded history of anti-Black racist ideas” that would perpetuate these depictions (7). The book surged in popularity across Europe and even influenced Africans themselves—Reynolds notes the story of a Moroccan renamed Johannes Leo, or “Leo Africanus,” who converted from Islam to Christianity in enslavement and wrote a survey of Africa that depicted his countrymen as “hypersexual savages, making him the first known African racist” (8). These types of stories gave rise to the popular idea that slavery was benevolent missionary work that tamed human beasts and brought them proper religion. That idea endured for centuries.

In the wake of Zurara, European commentators imagined and articulated various justifications for the enslavement of Africans. Two prominent racist theories emerged to articulate African inferiority. The first was “climate theory,” which suggested that the heat of the African continent darkened skin and rendered African bodies inferior. After English travelers met dark-skinned Inuit people in present-day northern Canada, however, “curse theory” emerged as an alternative. Curse theory invoked the Biblical curse of Ham, who God punished for having sex on Noah’s Ark in the book of Genesis. Curse theory insisted that Black people were the cursed offspring of Ham, officially equating Blackness with badness. Reynolds notes that “[c]urse theory would become the anchor of what would justify American slavery” (13). Americans continued to view slavery as a “loving” relationship with mutual benefits: labor from one party and mentorship and care from the other. New literature enforced this image, just as Zurara’s literature helped establish it.

The chapter shifts to a discussion of Puritan New Englanders who relocated to North America to establish a more regulated, “disciplined and rigid” (15) church than the Church of England from which they fled. Ministers John Cotton and Richard Mather, who built religious, educational, and social systems, exerted great power and influence in these new spaces. They appropriated the main tenets of the philosopher Aristotle’s ideas about Greek superiority to assert Puritan superiority over all non-Puritans and especially over people of color, specifically the Indigenous peoples of America and Africans.

Enslaved Africans came to the lands that would become the United States in August 1619. Traders sold twenty Angolans to the governor of Virginia, John Pory, in Jamestown, a colony several hundred miles south of Puritan Massachusetts that was also rooted in Christian beliefs. Pory and other planters sought enslaved labor for their estates. Missionaries, however, “wanted to grow God’s kingdom” (19) by converting Africans to Christianity. This confrontation began a long line of controversy between the religious desire to convert souls and the economic desire to maintain the image of “barbaric” and “animal-like” laborers who couldn’t be saved nor “loved even by God” (19), and were thus best suited for manual labor.

Reynolds follows up on the role of literature in promoting racist ideas in the 1600s. Richard Baxter’s A Christian Directory was a book about “voluntary slaves” (22) who sought baptism through the institution. English philosopher John Locke wrote about the supremacy of the white mind. Italian philosopher Lucilio Vanini popularized the idea that Africans “had a different creation story” (22) and were therefore a different species than white people. This theory is called “polygenesis.”

The reader also learns about the first organized antiracist literature in colonial America. Mennonites from Germantown, Pennsylvania produced the 1688 Germantown Petition Against Slavery. The petition was unsuccessful because slaveholders already fully relied on free labor.

One of the most important developments in the late 17th century was the articulation of white privilege, literally written into Virginia law in the aftermath of “Bacon’s Rebellion” in 1676—a unified attack on rich white individuals by a poor white planter and liberated Black people. To prevent a lower-class solidarity that could span the color line, colonial officials set up a system in which “Whites wouldn’t be punished, but they could surely do the punishing” (27). White rebels received pardons and all “Christians”—meaning white people—“now wielded absolute power to abuse any African person” (27). Enslaved Black people who partook in the fighting received 30 lashes.

Reynolds interrupts the narrative to discuss Indigenous Americans, as “this [history] is happening on their land” (24). He stresses the fact that Europeans stole and colonized that land, throughout which diverse Indigenous nations organized to protect their communities.

The central historical figure in this chapter is Cotton Mather, named for his ancestral ties to the aforementioned Puritan ministers John Cotton and Richard Mather. The youngest person ever to attend Harvard University, Mather became a prolific preacher initially focused on diverting public distrust to witches and away from the wealthy like himself. This emphasis fueled the infamous Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and 1693, a series of interrogations and executions that mostly targeted nonconformist Puritan women. The Witch Trials also “made the Black face the face of criminality” (33) by equating the Devil with the earthly Black creatures he manifested as. Although the tragedy in Salem and hysteria over local witches ended before the turn of the 18th century, Cotton Mather upheld the same ideals of traditional power hierarchies among races, genders, and religions throughout his life.

Cotton Mather died in 1728, just before the “First Great Awakening” inspired a religious zeal in the colonies that emphasized the old Puritan concern for conversion and soul-saving.

Societies across Colonial America boomed with the expansion of Bostonian intellectual life and a rise in tobacco profits. The latter meant an increase in the institution of slavery to supply the labor. Fearing rebellion from an expanding slave population, “slaveholders and politicians created […] a new set of racist codes” (34) that, among other items, forbade interracial relationships, classified people of color as livestock, prevented Black landownership or access to political offices, and expanded white prosperity while diminishing Black prosperity.