Ibram X. Kendi is Professor of History and International Relations and Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University in Washington, D. C. Most of his work covers 20th century racial justice movements, from the student activism of the 1960s to current activism. He’s the author of the recent book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.
Stamped from the Beginning is rather sweeping and ambitious. Kendi places the entire five or six century history of racist thought into a consistent historical narrative. He also takes steps toward assessing the relative importance of racist ideas to American life. The project is historical, sociological, political, and philosophical.
Segregationism, Antiracism, and Assimilationism
Kendi’s grand historical narrative is a struggle between three competing tendencies. These are segregationism, antiracism, and assimilationism. Segregationists accept and endorse ideas of white supremacy and black inferiority. For example, some of them endorse the idea that races are biologically real and ranked according to better and worse races.
Antiracists reject and oppose ideas of white supremacy and black inferiority. This includes both biological and cultural versions of those ideas. By including cultural versions, Kendi contributes in a big way to popular thought on race. I think it’s clear that antiracists are opposed to claims of biological inferiority. In fact, they ought to oppose all biological conceptions of race, given that ‘race‘ is not a coherent biological notion. But Kendi points out that genuine antiracism includes opposing the idea that black people are inferior in cultural forms, literature, music, or behavior.
Assimilationists combine pieces of these two tendencies. They accept segregationist ideas of white supremacy within the current system. But they argue that this is a problem, and that it’s a problem largely due to racism. Assimilationists argue that we can overcome white supremacy through education or social action. Segregationists, by contrast, argue that we should preserve the racist system.
Historical Reproduction
Kendi thinks the struggle between these three positions is not isolated to any time period. He finds the struggle in American history from the start of the slave trade in the 15th century through the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Racial history for Kendi is a matter of very incremental progress alongside occasional backlash and regression. Even progress often involves shifts in power from segregationists to assimilationists.
The struggle not only reasserts itself socially. It also happens within single individuals. Kendi carefully chronicles the evolution of W. E. B. Du Bois from his mostly assimilationist early work (e.g., The Souls of Black Folk) to his much more antiracist later work (e.g., Black Reconstruction in America). Du Bois is not alone. Kendi also traces transformations within Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, Angela Davis, et al.
A Strategic Orientation for Racial Justice Activism
One of Kendi’s most important claims is that racial justice activists spend too much time on moral issues and too little time considering people’s deeper self-interest. He raises the claim in a variety of ways. But I think the most compelling version is in the Epilogue.
Kendi writes that “racial reformers have customarily requested or demanded that Americans, particularly White Americans, sacrifice their own privileges for the betterment of Black people. And yet, this strategy is based on one of the oldest myths of…racists and antiracists alike: that racism materially benefits the majority of White people, that White people would lose and not gain in the reconstruction of an antiracist America. It has been true that racist policies have benefited White people in general at the expense of Black people (and others) in general…but it is also true that a society of equal opportunity, without a top 1 percent hoarding the wealth and power, would actually benefit the vast majority of White people much more than racism does.”
Giving Up Power or Gaining a Better World?
I left the quote a bit long. It’s an important point that Kendi sums up perfectly. It’s common for racial justice activists to frame activism in terms of white people giving up privileges or behaving altruistically. Even if it’s not the central theme, it lurks in the background. Kendi explains why this is a bad frame. Pragmatically, it’s a loser. It’ll never attract more than a small portion of whites. And the whites it does attract will tend to be well educated, wealthy whites who can afford to behave altruistically.
What Kendi adds is that it’s a losing strategy not only pragmatically, but also on substance. Racial justice is in the deeper self-interest of almost everyone, including almost all whites. Activism is about solidarity and coalition-building. It’s not about self-sacrifice. Kendi applies this point well.
Stamped from the Beginning
Finally, there’s the title of the book. It’s both reality and metaphor. Kendi intends the title to do significant work.
He pulls the title from a quote by Jefferson Davis, a U.S. Senator and president of the Confederacy during the Civil War. As a senator, Davis objected to a bill funding the education of black Americans. Davis said that “this government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes.” It was founded “by white men for white men,” grounded in an “inequality of the white and black races…stamped from the beginning.”
The metaphor part is obvious enough. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the literal meaning. Black Americans were stamped from the beginning during slavery, as the United States was metaphorically stamped from the beginning as a white supremacist state.
Kendi and Coates
On one level, Kendi is tying racism to a certain historical event, namely the founding of the United States. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in We Were Eight Years in Power, makes a similar move. Coates runs into trouble less because of his historical work, which is generally sound, and more because he attempts to turn that work into an explanatory thesis. I criticized some of the explanatory component of Coates’s work in an earlier post.
Kendi steers clear of this problem. I’ll discuss these issues at greater length in Part 2. But he does run into challenges in one area. He needs to extend the metaphor further into the past. As Kendi knows all too well, the problem of racism was a problem in America long before the founding of the United States. And so he doesn’t begin his book at the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. He begins it in 1415 with the beginnings of the Portuguese slave raids of Africa.
Kendi’s view, it seems to me, is that white supremacism was stamped from the beginning. And that the beginning began long before the Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia and George Washington fought the Redcoats.
N.B.
This is Part 1 of two posts on themes from Ibram X. Kendi’s book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. In Part 1 I cover some of the general themes from the book. In Part 2 I’ll focus on some questions concerning the relationship between capitalism and racism.
