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

The idea of discrimination through imprisonment or enslavement is a motif of Kendi’s text. Particularly in Jefferson’s era, the myth of the happy or satisfied slave, who prefers enslavement because it’s their God-given position, proliferates. Even this justification, though, admits to entrapment and limited freedom. From the period of enslavement forward, civil rights activists would think of enslavement and freedom as opposites, defining freedom not as non-slavery but as a more complicated term attaching enslavement to ideas like disenfranchisement or imprisonment.

Prison became an effective way to deal with black people who rebelled, who did not commit to uplift suasion, or who dealt with unemployment and limited economic mobility by dealing drugs. Angela Davis was the first leader to truly point to the direct connection between imprisonment and enslavement, but others have noted (and continue to note) that the notion of choice, or lack thereof, is central to antiracist thought. Though conversations of racial uplift and morality continue to emphasize black people’s choice of sexual behavior, employment, or living quarters, antiracist activists show that discrimination is not, or at least is not all, the product of uneducated and subpar decision-making. Barack Obama’s recognition that black people already know “that parents have to teach, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations” suggests (in what Kendi calls a revolutionary manner) that choice is not the only factor in discrimination and divides in wealth, housing, and educational opportunities (481).

Choice, then, becomes yet another imprisoning idea. While massive numbers of black people linger in prisons, those outside of it remain limited by rhetoric that disavows claims of a “race card.” Imprisonment and enslavement, commingled ideas, linger throughout Kendi’s text. 

The black female body, from Baartman to Sims’s gynecological experiments, is a source of fascination for white people, and particularly white men. Kendi intricately traces perceptions of black women as hypersexual through the period of enslavement in America, pausing for a significant amount of time to detail Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with a young enslaved woman, Sally Hemings. Hemings’s body, one of the black bodies that Jefferson himself called inextricably inferior to a white body, was also a sexualized object for him, and Hemings bore up to six of Jefferson’s children.

The debate over black women’s bodies continued to focus on their apparently-uncontrollable sexuality with the arrival of uplift suasion. Though women like Wells and other antiracist feminists like Anna Julia Cooper often took fully antiracist stances where men wouldn’t, the “immoral constructions about Black women” limited the power of their words (274). Entrenched visions of insatiable black women also prevented the work of black female authors and artists from being read and seen.

The painful contraceptive device called Norplant was recommended as an antidote to the “loose sexual behavior” that some claimed was the reason for single black motherhood (445). The debate over Norplant galvanized the black feminist movement, which began in the 1970s and 1980s, and accelerated into the intersectional field of Critical Race Studies.