Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

This two-page chapter serves as “a quick recap of racist ideas (so far)” (50). It lists climate theory, curse theory, polygenesis, inherent African savagery, the equation of dark (black) with evil and light (white) with good, the role of American slavery in creating African savagery, and, one more time for emphasis, African savagery.

By presenting the first 50 pages of the book in a numerical list, Reynolds drives home the major patterns of the history of racist ideas in America—particularly that commentators invented and continually sought to explain the myth of an inherent savagery in Black people.

At one sentence, this is the shortest chapter in the book. It reads, “Africans are not savages” (53).

Reynolds addresses the American Revolution by emphasizing the rhetoric produced in founding documents, particularly the statement made by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal.” The implications of this statement in a place where only white land-owning men could vote or hold office were huge; who constituted men and what constituted freedom were decidedly unclear.

Jefferson’s writings reveal the contradictions in his racial ideology. He simultaneously denounced slavery as cruel and inhumane yet upheld it as a viable economic system. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson “expressed his real thoughts on Black people. Uh-oh” (57), writes Reynolds. In that text, Jefferson articulated Black inferiority and denied Black people’s ability to ever ascend intellectually and socially. He insisted that creating a class of free Black people would invite a race war aimed at extermination. Instead, he suggested that the enslaved Black population in the US should be sent to Africa.

These ideas developed at a time when constitutional delegates decided to formally count any Black body as three-fifths of a person. Meanwhile, a successful 1791 revolution in Haiti won enslaved Africans freedom from French colonizers. While the Haitian Revolution spread hope to enslaved Africans elsewhere, it also spread dire fear to enslavers like Jefferson that they too could face violent revolt.

In another short chapter, one that Reynolds says is “a just so you know” (65) for the reader, the author introduces the concept of uplift suasion. Uplift suasion is a racist idea that tells Black people to live “respectable lives” and through an example of upstanding behavior, appearance, and morality, defy negative stereotypes about Black people. Though aimed at eventually achieving equality, the strategy signaled that “Black people couldn’t be accepted as themselves, and that they had to fit into some kind of White mold to deserve their freedom” (65).This assimilationist ideal carried great weight and enjoyed hints of success in the 1790s. It would remain influential long afterward.

According to Reynolds, uplift suasion centers on diminishing the Black individual to enhance the comfort of white society. It silences Black voices and culture to erase the projected threats that white society perceives in Black bodies and Black action. It is not an empowered approach to existence.

Enslavers had reason to fear widespread slave revolt. Reynolds cites a sabotaged 1800 revolt in Virginia that would have potentially upended the system within the state. Even with the revolt stopped in its tracks by a militia and its leader hanged, the attempt “made slave owners nervous. As it should’ve” (70). A viable solution for many of these fearful white enslavers was colonization, an idea Jefferson articulated in his Notes that involved deporting Black people to Africa and the Caribbean. Antislavery advocates even formed the American Colonization Society to lead the charge and to espouse the importance of freed and educated Black people saving and civilizing the supposedly ruinous African continent through their influence. The idea flopped among free Black people, who “didn’t want to go ‘back’ to a place they’d never known” (71).

When Jefferson became president, slave trading in the US shifted from a largely transatlantic model to a domestic model. This was not an improvement. Traders divided families and marched enslaved people across the Southern interior to new, labor-intensive plantations. Enslavers created the next generation of American slaves by forcing procreation so the system could reproduce itself without the need to trade for enslaved adults.

As the US recognized new states and admitted them to the union as either slave or free states, the controversy surrounding zones of slavery intensified. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state to keep the balance, divided along a North-South axis. The Western lands obtained through Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase were slowly added as territories and states. Jefferson envisioned those spaces as opportunities for internal slave colonization. He held onto his contradictions concerning slavery until he died on July 4, 1826. Reynolds characterizes Jefferson as a man who “knew that all men are created equal” but who “couldn’t rewrite his own racist ideas” (78).