Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (77 page)

Antiracist protesters have commonly rejected those racist ideas of what’s wrong with Black people that are used to justify the plight of majority-Black spaces and the paucity of Black people in majority-White
spaces. The most effective protests have been fiercely local; they are protests that have been started by antiracists focusing on their immediate surroundings: their blocks, neighborhoods, schools, colleges, jobs, and professions. These local protests have then become statewide protests, and statewide protests have then become national protests, and national protests have then become international protests. But it all starts with one person, or two people, or tiny groups, in their small surroundings, engaging in energetic mobilization of antiracists into organizations; and chess-like planning and adjustments during strikes, occupations, insurrections, campaigns, and fiscal and bodily boycotts, among a series of other tactics to force power to eradicate racist policies. Antiracist protesters have created positions of power for themselves by articulating clear demands and making it clearer that they will not stop—and policing forces cannot stop them—until their demands are met.

But protesting racist policies can never be a long-term solution to eradicating racial discrimination—and thus racist ideas—in America. Just as one generation of powerful Americans could decide or be pressured by protest to end racial discrimination, when the conditions and interests change, another generation could once again encourage racial discrimination. That’s why protesting against racist power has been a never-ending affair in America.

Protesting against racist power and succeeding can never be mistaken for seizing power. Any effective solution to eradicating American racism must involve Americans committed to antiracist policies seizing and maintaining power over institutions, neighborhoods, counties, states, nations—the world. It makes no sense to sit back and put the future in the hands of people committed to racist policies, or people who regularly sail with the wind of self-interest, toward racism today, toward antiracism tomorrow. An antiracist America can only be guaranteed if principled antiracists are in power, and then antiracist policies become the law of the land, and then antiracist ideas become the common sense of the people, and then the antiracist common sense of the people holds those antiracist leaders and policies accountable.

And that day is sure to come. No power lasts forever. There will come a time when Americans will realize that the only thing wrong with Black people is that they think something is wrong with Black people. There will come a time when racist ideas will no longer obstruct us from seeing the complete and utter abnormality of racial disparities. There will come a time when we will love humanity, when we will gain the courage to fight for an equitable society for our beloved humanity, knowing, intelligently, that when we fight for humanity, we are fighting for ourselves. There will come a time. Maybe, just maybe, that time is now.

Acknowledgments

I WOULD LIKE
to acknowledge all of the people I know and do not know who assisted and supported me in composing this history. From my ever-loving family members and friends to my ever-supportive colleagues across academia, in the State University of New York system, and now at the University of Florida, and to the countless thinkers, dead and alive, inside and outside academia, whose works on race have shaped my thinking and this history—I thank you. Without a doubt, this book is as much by you as it is by me.

I initially had not planned to write this book. I intended to write a history of the origins of Black Studies in higher education in the late 1960s. I decided to write my first chapter on the history of scientific racism, to show what the founders of Black Studies were struggling against. When I finished, I had a ninety-page chapter and a heavy bag of new thoughts about the history of racist ideas. I started thinking I may have a book on my hands. I will never forget talking all of this over with my father-in-law. I’m not sure if he remembers that conversation, but I do. Afterward, I decided that I would write the book that you now hold in your hands. And so I would like to express my thanks to B. T. Edmonds.

I decided to write a scholarly history that could be devoured by as many people as possible—without shortchanging the serious complexities—because racist ideas and their history have affected all of us. While historians in academia have become more accepting in recent decades of historians who write histories
on
the masses of Americans, historians are not nearly as accepting of those who write histories
for
the masses of Americans. Hopefully this will change.

I would like to acknowledge my agent, Ayesha Pande, who from the beginning was one of the major champions of this book. Ayesha, I do not take for granted that you believed in my ability to produce this far-reaching work. And I must thank Nation Books, a press that saw the potential of this book even when I did not always see it. I would also like to thank my editors, who along with Ayesha urged me to expand my original proposal of a narrow history of scientific racism to this comprehensive history of racist ideas. I would especially like to thank Clive Priddle, Carl Bromley, Alessandra Bastagli, and Daniel LoPreto. To Katy O’Donnell at Nation Books, thank you for keeping me on track to achieve the book’s vision and helping me to cross the finish line. To all of the people involved in the production and marketing of
Stamped from the Beginning
, I cannot thank you enough.

I must acknowledge that I had to compose this book during one of the most trying times of my life. These difficulties did not just stem from learning, nearly every week, about yet another tragic killing of an unarmed American by law enforcement. I also had to swallow my sadness in order to comfort and support two loved ones as they fought against the same debilitating disease. They experienced many personal struggles throughout these ordeals. As I am a very private person, I will not go into the details. But to all of those gracious family members, friends, and medical personnel who assisted my loved ones and helped them along the way, bringing a smile—or many smiles—and a sense of peace and healing to their faces and bodies, I thank you. When you brought them happiness and peace and healing, you brought me happiness and peace and healing. And when you brought me happiness and peace and healing, you enabled me to work on this book through those trying times.

I would like to give a special acknowledgment to my parents, the Reverends Carol and Larry Rogers; to my second mother, Nyota Tucker; and to my brothers, Akil and Macharia. Love is truly a verb, and I thank you for your love.

I saved one person, who is already joking about being the book’s co-author, for last—my wife, Sadiqa. I cannot tell you how many times I was sitting in our office, writing this text, and she was sitting there,
too, doing her own work, and I would interrupt her and ask, “Sadiqa, you have a second?” Inevitably, I would take more than a second to read her the passage and ask for her critical assessment. I cannot thank her enough for listening to me and giving me her critical love. I also cannot thank her enough for encouraging me through all those long, tiring days when I was researching and writing from the time it was dark in the morning to the time it was dark at night. Thank you, Sadiqa, and thank you everyone, for everything.

Notes

PROLOGUE

1
. Ryan Gabrielson, Ryann Grochowski Jones, and Eric Sagara, “Deadly Force, in Black and White,”
ProPublica
, October 10, 2014; Rakesh Kochhar and Richard Fry, “Wealth Inequality Has Widened Along Racial, Ethnic Lines Since End of Great Recession,” December 12, 2014, Pew Research Center,
www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/12/racial-wealth-gaps-great-recession
; Sabrina Tavernise, “Racial Disparities in Life Spans Narrow, but Persist,”
New York Times
, July 18, 2013,
www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/health/racial-disparities-in-life-spans-narrow-but-persist.html
.

2
. Leah Sakala, “Breaking Down Mass Incarceration in the 2010 Census: State-by-State Incarceration Rates by Race/Ethnicity,”
Prison Policy Initiative
, May 28, 2014,
www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/rates.html
; Matt Bruenig, “The Racial Wealth Gap,”
American Prospect
, November 6, 2013,
http://prospect.org/article/racial-wealth-gap
.

3
. Senator Jefferson Davis, April 12, 1860, 37th Cong., 1st sess.,
Congressional Globe
106, 1682.

4
. Gunnar Myrdal,
An American Dilemma
, vol. 2,
The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 928–929.

5
. Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in
Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches
(New York: Ten Speed, 2007), 115.

6
. Columbia anthropologist and assimilationist Ruth Benedict was instrumental in defining racism. See Ruth Benedict,
Race: Science and Politics
(New York: Modern Age Books, 1940); Ruth Benedict,
Race and Racism
(London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1942).

7
. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,”
University of Chicago Legal Forum
140 (1989): 139–167.

CHAPTER 1: HUMAN HIERARCHY

1
. Richard Mather,
Journal of Richard Mather: 1635, His Life and Death, 1670
(Boston: D. Clapp, 1850), 27–28; “Great New England Hurricane of 1635 Even Worse Than Thought,” Associated Press, November 21, 2006.

2
. Kenneth Silverman,
The Life and Times of Cotton Mather
(New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 3–4.

3
. Samuel Eliot Morison,
The Founding of Harvard College
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 242–243; Richard Mather et al.,
The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre
(Cambridge, MA: S. Daye, 1640); John Cotton,
Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes in Either England
(Boston: S. G., for Hezekiah Usher, 1656); Christopher J. Lucas,
American Higher Education: A History
, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 109–110; Frederick Rudolph,
Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977), 29–30.

4
. Francisco Bethencourt,
Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 3, 13–15; David Goldenberg, “Racism, Color Symbolism, and Color Prejudice,” in
The Origins of Racism in the West
, ed. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 88–92; Aristotle, edited and translated by Ernest Barker,
The Politics of Aristotle
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 91253b; Peter Garnsey,
Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 114.

5
. Hugh Thomas,
The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 27, 30; Garnsey,
Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine
, 75, 79.

6
. Alden T. Vaughan,
Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 157. Unless otherwise noted, emphasis is in original.

7
. Joseph R. Washington,
Anti-Blackness in English Religion, 1500–1800
(New York: E. Mellen Press, 1984), 232–235; Vaughan,
Roots of American Racism
, 157, 177–179; Lorenzo J. Greene,
The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620–1776
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 15–17; Craig Steven Wilder,
Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities
(New York: Bloomsbury Press), 29.

8
. John G. Jackson,
Introduction to African Civilizations
(Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1970), 196–231; Curtis A. Keim,
Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind
, 3rd ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 2014), 38; Adrian Cole and Stephen Ortega,
The Thinking Past: Questions and Problems in World History to 1750
, instructor’s ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 370–371.

9
. Ross E. Dunn,
The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, a Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 315–316.