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

This book is incredible — and brutal. Kendi has proven to be somewhat of a minor celebrity this past year and has just taken the helm of the new racial justice program at Boston University (my alma mater), but he is a deft and compelling writer, and he weaves his way through the history of race in America by forcing us to acknowledge the awful facts of our past. It’s simply unimaginable and undeniable what we (read: white people) have done to “other” races in the America’s for hundreds of years, and some of the stories are so shocking and appalling that it’s almost still impossible to imagine that they are actually true. Could we have possibly done all of this? Could all of this have actually happened? How could any of this still continue to be? It’s a sweeping book — over 700 pages, I believe — and easily the most notes I took on anything I read in 2020. Facts, truth … and then more facts and truth, Kendi just piles it all on. You’ll see America in a different light — which is pretty much exactly the point.

• racist progress has consistently followed racial progress
• african americans own 2.7 percent of the nations wealth and make up 40% of the incarcerated population
• segregationists have blamed black people themselves for racial disparities
• antiracists has pointed to racial discrimination
• assimilationists has tried to argue for both, black people and racial discrimination were to blame for racial injustices
• Jefferson Davis: “inequality of the white and black races was stamped from the beginning” — 1860, senate floor
• assmiliationists encourage black adoption of white cultural traits and/or physical ideals
• racist idea: any concept that regards once racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group in any way
• intersectionality — prejudice stemming from the intersections of racist ideas and other forms of bigotry such as sexism, classism, ethnocentrism, homophobia
• Cotton Mather — preached racial inequality in body while insisting that the dark souls of enslaved africans can become white when they come christian
• racist policies hace driven the history of racist ideas in america
• racial discrimiination — racist ideas — ignorance, hate
• politicians self interest — not necessarily racist ideas
• why did we not resits? racist ideas
• Kendi: I did not fully realize that the only thing wrong with black people is that we think something is wrong with black people. i did not fully realize that the only thing extraordinary about white peole is that they think something is extraordinary about white people
• antiracist — think there is nothing wrong with Black pool, to think that racial groups are equal
• principal producers and defenders of racist ideas will not join us
• studying aristotle, puritans learned rationales for human hierarchy, and they began to believe that some groups were superior to other groups
• puritans believed that they were superior than all non puritans
• extreme hot or cold climates produced intellectually physically and morally inferior people who were ugly and lacked the capacity for freedom and self government
• St. Paul — master (top), earthly master (middle), enslaved (Bottom)
• prejudice existed in the ancient world, races did not, but racist ideas did not, but the foundations of race and racist ideas were laid
• racist ideas that preceded american slavery, because the need to justify african slavery preceded colonial america
• Genesis 9:18–29 — negroes were the children of Ham, result of Noah’s curse, which produced Ham’s color, and the slavery God inflicted upon his descendants — curse theory
• Chronical of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, 1453, Zurara, anti black racist ideas, product of, not the producer of, Prince Henry’s racist policies concerning African slave trading
• Zuara imagined slavery in Portugal as an improvement over their free state in Africa — slaves brought to Portugal
• Portuguese became the primary source of knowledge on unknown african and the african people
• 1510, Las Casas — met of the physically strong beastly african, and the myth of the physically weak native american who easily dies from the strain of hard labor
• Leo Africanus — first known African racist, first illustrious African producer of racist ideas
• English travel writer George Best — climate theory fell apart to him in 1577, explained that Ham has sex on the Ark, God wills that Ham’s descendants shall be “so blacke and loathsome”
• “curse theorists” — first known segregationists, black people were naturally and permanently inferior, totally incapable of becoming White
• climate theorists were the first known assimilationists, believing black people had been nurtured by the hot sun into a temporary inferiority, but were capable of becoming white if they moved to a cooler climate
• normalizing negative behavior in faraway african people allowed writers to de-normalize negative behavior in white peple
• Puritans — economic returns or political power, bringing social order to the world
• was the exploitative master/servant or master/slave relationship as a loving family relationship
• English plays — inferior blackness and superior whiteness in Italy (Tragedy of Othello, Moor of Venice), racial politics of Othello
• 1605 — London, Masque of Blackness (play), inspired by climate theory
• In colonizing virginia, the brits had already conceived of distinct races
• John Pory — translated Leo Africanus’ book, defended curse theory, became colonial america’s first legislative leader
• tobacco — needed labor to grow it
• The Marrow of Sacred Divinity — puritans (the Mather’s) used the doctrine when assessing native americans and african strangers, ensuring intolerance from the start in their land of tolerance
• 1662 — virgina lawmen, “all children borne in this country derived their status from the condition of the mother”
• white enslavers could now reap financial reward from relations upon a negro woman
• severe penalties for white women in relationships with non white men
• heterosexual men freed themselves to engage in sexual relations with all women
• individualizing white negativity and generalizing black negativity — negative behavior by any black person became proof of what was wrong with black people, while negative behavior by any white person only proved what was wrong with that person
• 1660, london — Royal Society, europe’s scientific revolution had reached england
• father of English chemistry, Robert Boyle — Newton took it upon himself to substantiate Boyles color law — light is white is standard — Opticks (book) — Newton imagined “perfect whiteness”
• Council for Foreign Plantations — convert enslaved africans
• segregationist belief that enslaved africans should not or could not be baptized
• Cotton Mather — Puritan minister
• Richard Baxter wrote A Christian Directory — influenced Mather to want to make slaves into Christians, God’s law
• Locke — “You should feel nothing at all of others misfortune” “just war” theory to defend slavery in his free civil society
• Assimilationists argued monogenesis — all humans were one species descended from a single human creation in Europes garden of Eden
• segregationists argued polygenesis — multiple origins of multiple human species
• Golden Rule would forever inspire the cause of white antiracists (1688) — human hierarchies of any kind would do little more than oppress all of humanity
• rich planters learned from Nathanial Bacon’s landless white rebellion — poor whites had to be forever separated from enslaved blacks — creating more white privileges
• French physician and travel writer Francois Bernier — four or five species of men so notably differing from each other that this may serve as the just foundation for a new division of the world — all men are descended from one individual
• Europeans — being the “first” race
• Mather tried to redirect the resistance of commoners from local elites to British masters
• theological race concept — white and good
• all humans having an unblemished white soul
• 1688 — Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, The Royal Slave — first to use the terms white men, white people, negro
• 1692 — salem witch hunts — devil preying upon innocent white puritans was described as black
• ascribed a black face to criminality that remains to this day
• Mather never stopped defending the trials — hierarchies benefitted elites like him — accord with the law of God
• ambitious lowly resembled Satan — his kind of elites resembled God
• righteous assimilated whiteness and slavery to God and gods minions, or segregated criminal blackness and slavery to the devil and the devils minions
• imports of captives and racist ideas soared with tobacco exports
• Boston judge Samuel Sewall 1700, The Selling of Joseph — “Originally, and naturally, there is no such thing as slavery”
• new englanders should rid themselves of slavery and African people
• virginia’s 1705 code mandated that planters provide freed white servants with fifty acres of land- resulting white prosperity was then attributed to white superiority
• americans reading early colonial papers saw two things about blacks: they could be bought like cattle and they were dangerous criminals like those witches
• from their arrival in 1619, african people had illegally resisted slavery — stamped as criminals — in slave revolts, actual resisting africans were nearly always cast as violent criminals
• enslavers began to listen to the arguments of missionaries that christian submission could supplement their violence in subduing african people
• mather led the way in producing racist ideas of christianity simultaneously subduing and uplifting the enslaved africans
• perched that african people could become white in their souls
• Enlightenment — light became a metaphor for Europeans, whiteness, a notion that Franklin and his philosophical society embraced and imported to the colonies
• connection between lightness and whiteness and reason, on the one had and between darkness and blackness and ignorance on the other
• socioeconomic inequities were gods or natures or nurtures will, racist ideas defined the enslaved
• Linneaus — hierarchy within the human kingdom and this human hierarchy was based on race
• hierarchies of black ethnic groups within the african kingdom can be termed ethnic racism- black ethnic group as inferior
• hierarchy of races and of ethnic groups within the races
• voltaire — Essay on Universal History 1756- if their understanding is not of a different nature from ours it is at least greatly inferior
• polygenesis — separately created races
• permanent black inferiority appealed to enslavers
• most of the leading enlightenment intellectuals were producers of racist ideas and abolitionist thought
• mulatto — mules were the infertile offspring of horses and donkeys
• Jefferson’s earliest memory was of a slave who took him on a ride to a plantation — slavery for him was associated with comfort
• 1771- Phyllis Wheatley — assmilationissts galloped around seeking out human experiments during 18th centuries race for Enlightenment, barbarians to civilize into the superior ways of europeans, to prove segregationists wrong and sometimes to prove slaveholders wrong — Wheatley was an educated black writer/woman
• poems published in 1773 in London, a year after slavery was abolished there
• Londoners condemned american slavery
• british commentators slammed the hypocrisy of Bostonians boasts of Wheatley’s ingenuity while keeping her enslaved, and then she was freed
• Jefferson’s A Summary View of the Rights of British America piloted him into the clouds of national recognition
• concept of different creation stories and different species started making sense to more and more people in the late 18th century as they tried to come to grips with racial difference
• Kant — humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of whites
• polygenesists and monogenesists had no problem coming together to inflame public sentiment against england and dismiss their own atrocities against africans
• Franklin — argued that england was enslaving Americans, regularly using the analogy that england was making american whites black
• Jefferson: “all men are created equal”
• never believed all human groups are equal
• propelled VT and MA to abolish slavery — to uphold polygenesis and slavery, six southern states inserted “all freemen are created equal into their constitutions
• for rich men, freedom was the power to create choices
• Jefferson, power came before freedom, power creates freedom
• in the declaration of independence, Jefferson criminalized runaways and silenced women
• Adam Smith, wealth of nations — stemmed from a nations productive capacity, a productive capacity african nations lacked
• jefferson, anti slavery and anti abolition, segregationists dose of natures distinctions, antiracist dose acknowledging white prejudice and discrimination (Notes on the State of Virginia)
• mass schooling, emancipation and colonization of africans back to africa
• emerged as the preeminent american authority on black intellectual inferiority
• Notes became the most consumed american nonfiction book until well into the mid nineteenth century
• equating enslaved blacks to the 3/5 of all other white persons matched the ideology of racists on both sides on the aisle
• black people were simultaneously human and subhuman
• Jefferson + Sally Hemmings — in France, she got pregnant by him, she wanted freedom, “he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed”
• 5 and possibly as many as 7 children from Jefferson
• in northern states, they made almost no moves to end racial discrimination and thereby racist ideas
• discriminatory policies were a feature of almost every emancipation law
• Haiti, 1791–100,000 African freedom fighters killed more than 4,000 enslavers
• Fuguitve Slave Law Act of 1793 — slaveholders the right and legal apparatus to recover escaped africans and criminalize those who harbored them
• uplift suasion — white people could be persuaded away from their racist ideas if they saw black people improving their behavior, uplifting themselves from their low station in american society. burden of race relations was placed squarely on the shoulders of black americans
• negative black behavior was partially or totally responsible foe the existance and persistence of racist ideas
• impossible for blacks to execute
• upwardly mobile blacks were regularly cast aside as unique and different from ordinary, inferior black people
• when black people rose, racists either violently knocked them down or ignored them as extraordinary — when black people were down, racists called it their natural or nurtured place, and denied and role in knocking them down in the first place
• Eli Whittney — cotton gin — value of southern lands skyrocketed and quickly dethroned rice and tobacco
• cotton — freed american enslavers from england and tightened the chains of african people in american slavery
• master/slave rape or intercourse seemed “natural”, enslaving one’s children seemed normal in slaveholding america
• americans came to understand slavery and its sexual politics as an immutable fact of their lives and the economy
• necessary evil to pay off their debts and build their nation
• slave trade act of 1807 — empty and mostly symbolic law
• “breeding” captives to supply the deep south’s demand — slave ships traveling from virginia to new orleans
• legal termination of the international slave trade in 1808 — boon for american slavery
• Parisians displayed Baartman (african woman) skeleton, genitals, and brain until 1974
• largest slave revolt in history occurred in 1811- hoping for assurances of federal protection in case of future rebellions, Louisiana sugar planters voted to join the union in 1812
• enslaved africans went from 1.1M in 1810 and tripled over the next 50 years
• Jefferson needed slavery in 1809 to maintain his financial solvency and life of luxury1
• 1802 — virgina lawmen asked jefferson to find a foreign home for the states free blacks
• expel blacks from the states before it was too late
• jefferson insisted blacks were incapable of achieving whiteness in the US
• africans in america had received their knowledge of Africa and their racist ideas from white americans — white americans racist ideas had been procured from a shot of European writers
• European nations were increasingly turning their capital and guns from the slave trade to the cause of colonizing Africa
• european colonizers would supposedly bring progress to africans residents, just as european enslavers had brought progress to africans in the americas
• 1824 — american settlers renamed “Liberia” — between 1820–1830, only 154 black northerners of more than 100K sailed to Liberia
• 1822 — until Denmark Vesey, northerners had produced most of the racists books and tracts defending slavery
• Missouri compromise of 1820 — missouri as a slave state and maine as a free state, to prohibit the introduction of slavery in the northern section of the vast Louisiana Territory
• jefferson dreamed that the LT could swallow slavery
• in his finally years, Jefferson said that “on the subject of emancipation i have ceased to think because it is not to be the work of my day”
• freed blacks to be hauled away to africa in the same manner enslaved blacks had been hauled to america
• Jesus, was always depicted as white
• blacks and whites started to make connections, consciously and subconsciously between the white god the father, his white son jesus, and the power and perfection of white people
• southern colonizationists sought to remove free blacks, northerners sought to remove all blacks, enslaved and freed
• nations fist black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal in NYC
• John Russwurm, third african american college graduate in the US, was editor
• used the first african american periodical to circulate the ideas of class racism
• aside from his lemmings children, Jefferson did not free any of the other enslaved people at monticello
• owned more than 600 slaves over the course of his lifetime
• $100K in debt when he died
• 1826 — revolutionary era abolitionist movement was pretty much dead
• William Lloyed Garrison joined Benjamin Lundy to co edit Genius of Universal Emancipation
• alexis detocqueville — prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the staes that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists — Democracy in America, 1835
• described the vicious cycle of racist ideas, cycle that made persuading or educating racist ideas away nearly impossible
• Garrison was in Boston — immediate abolition and gradual equality — “gradual abolition”
• increase in knowledge and moral improvement among free blacks was an effort in uplift suasion not unlike the avowals of editors of Freedom Journal, first black newspaper — Garrison was a believer
• Nigger Hill in Boston/Little Africa in Cincinnati — places where black people lived
• black behavior was blamed for these empoverished black enclaves
• racist policies harmed black neighborhoods, generating racist ideas that caused people not to want to live next to blacks, which depressed the value of black homes, which cause people not to want to live in black neighborhoods even more, owing to low property values
• immigrants were called White Niggers
• first minstrel shows — 1830, Thomas “Daddy” rice — appeared as Jim Crow, in blackface, dressed in rags, torn shoes, and a weathered hat, sang and dance as a stupid, childlike, cheerful black field hand
• blackface minstrelsy became the first american theatrical form, incubator of american entertainment industry
• minstrel shows remained mainstream until about 1920, when racist films took it’s place
• black people as a social problem
• Garrison — moral persuasion, moral power
• after 1830, young single white working class women earning wages outside the home were growing less dependent t on men financially and becoming more sexually free
• white male gang rapes of white women began to appear around the same time as the gang assaults by white men on black people
• both were desperate attempts to maintain white male supremacy
• Garrison was nearly alone among white public figures shouting down John Calhoun
• founder of anthropology in the US, Samual Morton, 1839 — Crania Americana
• skulls from the caucasian race measured out the largest, concluded that whites had the highest intellectual endowments of all the races
• Fredrick Douglas — traveling speaker after slavery, emerged as america’s newest “black exhibit”
• introduced to audiences as a “chattel” a “thing” “piece of southern property”
• garrison printing office published The Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglas, an American Slave
• no other piece of antislavery literature had such a profound effect
• garrison enjoyed presenting two types of black people, degraded or excelling
• AP — sensationalized and did not nuance, recycled and did not trash stereotypes or the status quo (news)
• alabama’s J Marion Sims started experimenting on the vagina’s of 11 enslaved women for a procedure to heal a complication of childbirth called vesicovaginal fistula
• sims starting healing white victims, moved to NYC, built the first woman’s hospital, fathered american gynecology
• granite monument dedicated to him — first US statue depicting a physician — now sits at 5th avenue and 103rd street across from the academy of medicine
• Fugitive Slave Act 1850 — criminalized abettors of fugitives, provided northerners incentives to capture them, denied captured blacks a jury trial, opening the door to mass kidnappings
• Sojourner Truth, 1851, women rights conference in Akron
• “aint i a woman? look at me! look at my arm! aint i a woman? I can out work, out eat outlast any man! aint i a woman?”
• dual challenge of antiracist feminism
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin — Harriet Beecher Stowe
• asked only for americans to alter the implications, the meaning of their deep seated beliefs
• in order to become b better christians, white people must constrain their domineering temperament and end the evil outgrowth of that temperament — slavery
• spiritual superiority allowed blacks to have soul
• Uncle Tom the identifier of black submissiveness
• Stowe called for northerners to teach blacks until they reached moral and intellectual maturity, and then assist them in their passage to africa — revitalized the colonization movement
• in the 1850’s and 60’s, black and white men were asserting their right to rule women
• 1853 — Josiah Not and George Giddeon published Types of Mankind, 800 pages of polygenesis
• “when men oppress their fellow men, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression” — Douglas, in opposition to the book
• Douglas emerged as the most famous abolitionist and assimilationist in the US
• Kansas — Nebraska act of 1854 left the slavery question to be settled by the settlers, this repealing the Missouri compromise
• Lincoln was a disciple of Henry Clay, who believed in colonization — called clay “my ideal of a great man”
• 1857 — Dred Scott v. Sandford, court rejected the freedom suit of Dred Scott — missouri compromise unconstitutional, questioned the constitutionality of northern abolition, stripped congress of its power to regulate slavery in the territories and stated hat black people could not be citizens
• nothing enriched northern investors and factory owners and southern landowner and slaveholders in 1857 as much as the nations principle export, cotton
• Douglas — Lincoln debates in Illinois
• Lincoln “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making black people voters or jurors or politicians or marriage partners. there is a physical difference between the white and black races which i believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. and inasmuch as they cannot live, while they do remain together there must be the position of the superior and the inferior, and i as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race”
• Imending Crisis of the South — North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper — slavery needed to end because it was retarding southern economic progress and the opportunities of non slaveholding whites who were oppressed by wealthy enslavers
• a way to oppose slavery without being cast a pro black, Lincoln looked for
• On the Origin of Species, Darwin, who was antislavery
• natural selection — recurring struggle for existence “all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection”
• tried to prove that all living things the world over were struggling, evolving spreading, and facing extinction or perfection
• herbert spencer — principles of biology in 1864 — survival of the fittest
• Darwins cousin, Dalton, father of modern stats
• “average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two games below our own” coined the phrase “nature vs. nurture” clamming nature was undefeated — Eugenics, 1883
• Lincoln platform pledged not to challenge southern slavery — declaration of freedom as the normal condition of all the territories
• 1861 — confederacy VP, Alexander Stephens “great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man” = “Corner Stone” speech of the confederacy
• to black eople and to abolitionists the civil war was over slavery and enslavers were to blame
• Confiscation Act — slave holders forfeited their ownership of any property including enslaved africans, used by the confederate military
• one out of every for of the 1.1M men, women and children in the contraband camps died in one of the worst public health disasters in US history (contraband folks — no longer enslaved but not free)
• black resistance, not persuasion, finally started to eradicate the racist idea of the docile black person in northern minds
• Second Confiscation Act — all confederate owned africans who escaped union lines or who resided in territories occupied by the union to be “forever free of their servitude”
• Lincoln wanted emancipation to save the union
• black race could never be placed on equality with the white race in the US, Lincoln said in a meeting in 1862 — pressed the black people in the meeting to make the trek to Liberia and start anew
• “If i could save the union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if i could save it by freeing all the slaves i would do that. what i do about slavery, and the colored race, i do because i believe it helps to save the union” — Lincoln, 1862
• gradual, compensated emancipation and colonization was his plan
• he kept enslaved the nearly half million african people in border states, in order to maintain their owners loyalty after the emancipation proclamation of 1863 — he also kept enslaved the roughly 300KL african people in the newly exempted formerly confederate areas, in order to establish their owners loyalty
• segregationists adamant about black brutes incapacity assimilationists like Garrison and Villard adamant about black brutes capacity, became the primary conversation in the wake of emancipation
• 200K black men served in the war
• promoted white male soldiers and stressed white male physical superiority
• Lincoln eventually went off colonization, but racism remained
• Lincoln emancipated, but most fought off or slipped away from the confederate wolves on their plantations on their own, and then ran to freedom on their own, and then into the union army aon their own to put down the confederacy
• Lincoln followed Jefferson’s lead — pay lip service to the cause of black uplift, while supporting the racist policies that ensured the downfall of black people
• the problem was the lack of land post slavery, for slaves
• distinguished between abolishing slavery and freeing people — land to till by our own labor, they wanted, and needed
• millions of white settlers had acquired western land, confiscated from rebel native communities over the years, and those whites had been freed
• Lincoln professed preference for bestowing voting rights on the very intelligent” blacks and black soldiers, post war
• empowered by President Andrew Johnson, confederates barred blacks from voting, elected confederates as politicians, and instituted a series of discriminatory black codes
• 13th amendment barred slavery “except as a punishment for crime” — postwar south became the spitting image of the reward south in everything but name
• congress forced only one group of slavholders to provide land to their former captives — confederacy’s native american allies
• garrison did not use his genius in this time for antiracism
• Johnson’s true fear was that black voters looked own on the poor whites and would forge a political alliance with planters to rule them
• blacks did in fact look down on poor whites — denigrated the whites who did not enslave them as “white trash”
• white trash conveyed that white elites were the ordinary representatives of whites
• Civil rights act of 1866 — did not target private, local or race veiled laws of racial discrimination
• Johnson vetoed — any semblance of equal opportunity, racists are sued, blacks would become dominators and whites would suffer — racist folklore of reverse discrimination — Johnson crafted this form of racism
• black troops were redeployed out west as Buffalo Soldiers — killed indigenous communities in the west to make way for white settlers — troops redeployed as blamed for a riot in Memphis in 1866
• 14th amendment — not guaranteeing black male suffrage
• light skinned blacks tended to attend the schools with greco-roman curricula, training for leadership, and darker skinned blacks end up at industrial schools, training for submission
• KKK — founded in 1865 as a social club in TN — reign of terror, assassinating republicans, barring blacks from voting
• 1869–15th amendment — protections for black politicians, uniform voting requirements, and the prohibition of race veiled measures to exclude blacks were denied
• if it had been left up to the first generation of black male politicians, women may have received voting rights in the 1870;s
• 15th amendment caused republicans to turn their backs on the struggle against racial discrimination
• black women’s bodies were regarded as “training ground” for white men — defend purity of white women
• republicans remained unwilling to fortify blacks with Buffalo Soldiers and land
• southern constittional conventions 1867–1869 first publicly funded educational systems, penitentiaries, orphanages, insane asylums, expanded women’s rights and guaranteed black rights, reduced number of crimes, reorganized local governments to eliminate dictatorships — successes post civil war
• Slaughterhouse Cases — Justice Samuel Miller — shielded private and race veiled discriminators, those who veil policies intended to discriminate against black people by not using racial language
• southern blacks went backwards into sharecropping
• northern press reports regularly depicted black voters and politicians as self destructively stupid and corrupt — AP relied on anti black, anti reconstruction southern papers for daily dispatches
• prison doc in italy, Cesare Lombroso, “proved” in 1876 that non white men loved to kill, mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh and drink its blood — Criminal Man book gave birth to criminology — criminals were born, not bred
• Bargain of 1877 — democrats handed Republican Rutherford B hayes the presidency while hayes ended reconstruction for the democrats
• blacks in post reconstruction south carolina, naturally submissive intelligence or naturally rebellious stupidity
• someone was lynched, on average, every four days from 1889–1929
• in the south, regain absolute political, economic and cultural control
• emancipation, discriminators started picturing blacks as weak, too weak to survive in freedom
• 1883, supreme court declared civil rights act of 1875 unconstitutional
• Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady — coined the term separate but equal
• W E B du bois left for Harvard in 1888 at a time when racist southerners were calmly debating two paths for the negro — should they be carefully civilized or rigidly segregated from whites?
• Walter Vaughn in Nebraska — first proposal for reparations, pensions for ex slaves — Freedmen’s Pension Bill: A plea for american freedmen, 1891 -
• economic injustices affecting low income blacks took a back seat to education and voting injustices among black elites
• DuBois consumed from assimilationists the racist idea that african americans had been socially and morally crippled by slavery and africa
• Henry Cabot Lodge — Force Bill — mandate federal supervision of elections when local voters petitioned washington about voter fraud, 1890
• states put in race veiled voting restrictions from literacy tests to poll taxes that would purge their voting rolls of remaining black and many poor white voters without saying a racist word
• Force Bill never passed
• defeat of bill ended republican efforts to enforce 13th — 15th amendments
• Ida Wells — journalist — white men were lying about black on white rape, and hiding their own assaults of black women
• DuBois became known as one of the “half dozen negroes” who had allowed Harvard to “make a man out of a semi beast” — FDR said as a Harvard frosh in 1903
• Booker T Washington — new south racism that elites enjoyed hearing — Atlanta Comproimise of 1895 — asked southern whites to stop trying to push blacks out of the house of america and allow them to reside comfortably in the basement — to help them rise up, knowing that when they rose up the whole house would rise up
• 1896 — Plessy v Ferguson — Jim Crow laws did not violate the 13th or 14th
• separate but unequal
• progressive era was rigged by elite white men and women
• Brit Physician Havelock Ellis — Studies in the Psychology of Sex *(1897) — “homosexual”, classifying it as a congenital physiological abnormality or sexual inversion
• homophobic scholars started blaming that lesbians will in practically every instance disclose an abnormally prominent clitoris — particularly in colored women
• statistician for Prudential insurance, frederick hoffman, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro — 1896
• father of american public health — free blacks were headed towards gradual extinction pulled down by their natural immoratlities, law breaking and diseases
• denied black men life insurance
• Dubois proved unable to stop the cycle of racial profiling and crime stats and racial ideas
• failed to gain the following or financial support of northern philanthropists that Booker T enjoyed
• post spanish american war 1898, new us colonies were not ready for freedom (thought)
• non whites incapable of self rule
• White Savior — stories were fast becoming a fixture in american memoirs, novels and theatrical productions
• 1901 — Roosevelt had Booker T to the white house, criticized, never did it again and then officially named the white house The White House
• DuBois “He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American” — comment on Blacks
• warring crossroads between assimilationists and antiracist ideas — cultural relativity (every person looking at the self from the eyes of his or her own group)
• assimilationist — black individuals seeing themselves from the perspective of white people
• Talented Tenth — top 10% of Black America
• black people were responsible for changing racist white minds — white people were not responsible for their own racist mentalities
• Columbia professor Frank Boas, emigrated from germany in 1886, was jewish
• taught about the glories of precolonial west african kingdoms, awakened DuBois from the paralysis of his historical racism
• Jack Johnson — had a white wife, by 1909, gender racism of the submissive white woman and the hard black woman was attracting patriarchal black men to white women
• arrested on trumped up charges of transporting a prostitute (white woman) across state lines
• Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Tarzan — “white skin”, in their language (apes)
• Tarzan protects a white woman named jane from ravishing black men and apes all around her
• post became a hollywood staple, like Avatar — white people will do it better than the african apelike children, so much better that whites will always, the world over, become teachers of the african peoples
• NAACP , 1910
• Chicago biologist Charles Davenport, Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Lab in NY
• wanted to prove that personality and mental traits were inherited and that superior racial groups inherited superior traits
• eugenics movement created believers, not evidence
• if some could break away, the logic went, then all could, if they just worked hard enough (for black people)
• Wilson — gave southern segregationists a dominant influence in his administration, while encouraging blacks to focus on uplift suasion
• Birth of a Nation, 1915 film, first full length feature film in Hollywood, DW Griffith, based on Thomas Dixon novel The Clansmen
• birth of hollywood — newest visual medium by which to circulate racist ideas
• by jan 1916, 3M people had viewed the film in NYC alone — nations highest grossing film for two decades — revitalized the KKK
• WWI — black people, great migration north
• black and white natives of northern cities looked down on the migrants
• over the course of 6 decades, some 6M black southerners left their homes
• Marcus Garvey, Jamaican, Universal Negro Improvement Association — global african solidarity, beauty of dark skin, afro culture, global african self determination, africa for the africans
• edward bryon — Mulatto in the US (1918)
• biracial people were abnormal
• eugenicists — 1916 Passing of the Great Race — NY Lawyer Madison Grant constructed a racial ethnic ladder
• 1924- Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, cited Passing, called it “my bible”
• 1916 — Stanfor Eugenicist Lewis Terman — general intelligence did not exist
• standardized test becomes the newest “objective” method of proving black intellectual inferiority and justifying discrimination and a multimillion dollar testing industry quickly developed in schools and workplaces
• SAT test created in 1918
• Treaty of Versailles, 1919 — Wilson admin joined with england and australia in rejecting japans proposal that the league charter confess to a commitment to the equality of all peoples
• racist white newspapers — black victims as criminals, white criminals as victims
• 1919 — Communist Party created in US — Eugene Debs
• theorized if they killed capitalism, racism would die too, although both had been mutually fortifying one another while developing separately for centuries
• white laborers and unions were discriminating against and degrading black laborers to increase their own wages, improve their own working conditions and bolster their own political power
• Mamie Robinson — Crazy Blues, first best selling blues song, antiracist, 1920
• DuBois didn’t love Garvey, said that “American negros recognized no color line in or out of the race”; used racist ideas and his punhising power to silence the antiracist challenge to color discrimination
• DuBois vs. Garvey, 1920’s — Dubois wanted a multiracial pluralism, but he graded black people himself in racist fashion
• black artists in 1920’s didn’t take direction from DuBois, they called themselves the “Niggerati”, first known fully antiracist intellectual and artistic group in american history — members rejected class racism, cultural racism, historical racism, gender racism, queer racism, and some were homo or bisexual
• Langston Hughes — change through the force of his art that old whispering “I want to be white” — “I am a negro — and beautiful, and ugly, too”
• 1926 — Carl Van Vechten wrote Nigger Haven based on Harlem Renaissance, a novel
• black people could never quite reach the greatness of white civilization but they were running away form the greatness of their natural savagery
• whites started pouring into harlem, black america, to see, hear and touch the supposed primitive superior birthright of black artistry and sexuality
• black commoners were sometimes portrayed before white america as sexual, uneducated, lazy, crude, immoral and criminal
• while “negative” portrayals of black people often reinforced racist ideas, “positive” portrayals did not necessarily weaken racist ideas
• claude bowers, editor of new york post — The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln” — helped the dems keep the segregationists in power for another generation
• 1929 — great depression hit, no jobs for niggers until every white man has a job — deep south slogan
• 1932- US public health service began its Study of Syphillis in the Untreated Negro Male — researchers promised free medical care to 600 syphillis infected sharecroppers around Tuskegee, Alabama — secretly withheld treatment to these men an waited for their deaths so they could perform autopsies
• study was not halted until the press exposed it in 1972
• King Kong, 1933 — remake of Birth of a Nation, set in the island scenery of Tarzan
• NBC radio comedy Amos n andy — characters included Coons, Toms, Mammies, Sapphire — first major media representation of an angry black woman
• hollywoods first black celebrity, Step-in Fetchit, roles depicted the “laziest man in the world”
• 1933 — Dubois 65, had almost completely turned to anti-racism — thought black people needed to rely on one another
• New deal — segregationists were given the power to locally administer and racially discriminate the relief coming from these federal programs
• housing — color coded maps coloring black neighborhoods in red as undesirable
• black folks in the north did receive some assistance
• Dubois — instead of using our energy to break down the brick walls of white insistuitions, why not use our energy refurbishing our own?
• swung back at the critics who believed that assimilation and accomplishment by negroes could break down prejudice
• Jesse Owens — came back from olympics to no work, ran against horses and dogs to stay out of poverty, talking about now nazis had treated him better than americans
• 1938 — American Anthropoligical Association denounced biological racism
• columbia anthropologist Ruth Benedict — racism is an unproved assumption of the biological and perpetual superiority of one human group over another — Race, Science, Politics, 1940 — excused her class of assimilationists from her definition, though, and ll those women and men who assumed the cultural and temporary superiority of one human group over another
• Franklin Frazier, 1939, Howard Sociologist, The Negro Family in the United States
• painted broad strokes of the urban, non elite black family as an ugly, disordered, matriarchal albatross
• conk, short for the recipe called congolese — black men joined black women in straightening their hair
• 1939 — Gone with the wind — white enslavers portrayed as a noble and thoughtful, the slaves as loyal but shiftless, unprepared for freedom
• most successful film at the box office in hollywood history — how whites learned about slavery
• anthropologist zora neale hurston — Their Eyes Were Watching God — antiracist feminist book
• James Baldwin — what blacks needed to do was infinitely more difficult they had to accept their imperfect equal humanity
• black america’s Double V Campaign — victory against racism at home and racism abroad
• Gunnar Myrdal — 1500 page study, An American Dilemma — “white americans display an astonishing ignorance about the negro”
• one of his solutions was still black assimilation
• anthropologist ashley montage — Mans Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race 1942
• all cultures must be judged in relation to their own history — and definitely not by the arbitrary standard of any single culture
• nature and nurture — evolutionary biology grew over the course of the century
• Truman Doctrine — 1947 — US the leader of the free world and the Soviets the leader of the unfree world
• Truman Committee on Civil Rights, 1947, recommended civil rights legislation
• 1948 — he used his executive power to desegregate the armed forces and the federal workforce
• Shelley v Kramer — 1948 — courts could not enforce all those whites only real estate covenants proliferating in northern cities to keep out migrants and stop housing desegregation
• open housing movement — open the floodgates of white opposition to desegregation
• whites preferred flight over fight
• GI bill gave birth to the white middle class and widened the economic gap between the races, a growing disparity racists blamed on poor black fiscal habits
• McCarthy — DuBois at 82 was arrested and exonerated in 1951 — had his passport revoked
• scarcely a community in the early 1950’s where prejudice was not fueling cruelly unjust white campaigns against open housing, desegregated education, equal job opportunities and civil rights
• past-future declaration of assimilationists — come a long way and a long way to go, purposefully sidestepped the present reality of racism
• Eisenhower — discontinued the truman doctrine on civil rights — thought it was a failure of individual feelings
• Brown v Board — eisenhower told Justice Warren he could understand why southerners wanted to make sure “their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big black buck”
• Warren: separate black educational facilities were inherently unequal and inferior because black students were not being exposed to white students
• forced busing of children from black schools to inherently superior white schools
• rarely were white children bused to black schools
• assimilationist reasoning behind the brown decision
• Elijah Muhammad — preached racial separation, not black supremacy, arguing that whites were an inferior race of devils
• segregationists had stripped the civil rights act of 1957 of its enforcement powers
• “most repugnant act in all of his eight years in the white house” — Eisenhower sent federal troops to protect the Little rock students as they entered school
• JFK — said little about civil rights on the campaign trail — him and nixon didn’t want to take sides
• To Kill a Mockingbird — Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the civil rights movement, rousing millions of readers for the racial struggle through the amazing power of racist ideas
• african americans come across as waiting and hoping for a white savior, thankful for the moral heroism of Atticus — no more popular racist relic of the enslavement period than the notion that black people must rely on whites to bring them their freedom
• michael harrington, anti poverty best seller in 1962- The Other America
• laws against color can be removed but that will leave the poverty that is the historic and insitutionalized consequence of color”
• Wallace — lost to the klan endorsed candidate in 1958 gubernatorial election in Alabama, said “well boys, no other son of a bitch will ever outnigger me again”
• Glazer, Moynihan — Beyond the Melting Pot, 1963 — negro is only an american, and nothing else. he has no values and culture to guard and protect
• letter from a birmingham jail, MLK — “injustice everywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”
• young activists had grown critical of king’s non violence
• 1963, 78% of white americans believed that racial discrimination had harmed US reputation abroad
• March on washington — kennedy aides approved the speakers and speeches, no black women, no Baldwin, no malcolm X
• angela davis — ‘never harbored or expressed the desire to be white’ — went to Brandeis
• Malcom X to mecca — true islam has shown me that a blanket indictiment of all white people is wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks — from then on, he took on the racist wolves and devils, no matter the skin color
• civil rights act — opened floodgates for new racist ideas to pour in, including the idea that ignored the white head start, presumed that discrimination had been eliminated, presumed that equal opportunity had taken over, and figured that since blacks were still losing the race, the racial disparities and their continues losses must be their fault
• racial progress and progression at the same time
• discriminators privatized public policies to get around the act
• allowed employers to give and to act upon the results of any professionally developed ability test
• officials could justify racial disparities by pointing to test scores
• something was wrong with the black test takers, not the test
• barry goldwater — Conscience of a conservative — welfare transforms the individual from a dignified, industrious self reliant spiritual being into a dependent animal creature without his knowing it
• black mothers on welfare as undeserving — dependent animal creatures
• Malcolm X gunned down — NY Times headline: Apostle of Hate is Dead
• Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley — X’s ideological transformation from assimilationist to anti white separatist, to antiracist — inspired millions
• opened more antiracist minds
• “I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”
• Johnson — “You do not take a person, who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and say, you are free to compete with all the others, and still justly believe that you have been completely fair” — possibly the most antiracist statement from a president (said post Selma, 1965)
• intent focused civil rights act of 1964 was not nearly as effective as the outcome focused voting rights act of 1965
• most effective piece of antiracist legislation ever passed by congress, but not without loopholes
• class racism — downgrading the lives of black commoners in majority black spaces, became wrapped up in the term “minority” — 1965, Kenneth Clark published Dark Ghetto
• term “ghetto” was known as an identifier of the ruthlessly segregated jewish communities in nazi germany
• neighborhoods, the people, the culture were inferior, low class, unrefined
• Stokely Carmichael — “What we gonna start saying now is Black Power”
• 1966 — for many racists that black power meant blacks violently establishing black supremacy and slaughtering white folks
• Huey Newton and Bobby Neale — Black Panthers — stranglehold of police brutalizers, tyrannical slumlords, neglectful school boards and exploitive businessmen
• civil rights movement transformed into the black power movement of 1967
• MLK made his way out of the good graces of assimilationist america that year
• desegregation had primarily benefited black elites, leaving millions wallowing in the wrenching poverty that had led to their urban rebellions
• King wanted economic bill of rights — full employment and guaranteed income, affordable housing
• “the road to lasting progress was civil disobedience, not persuasion”
• King was labeled as becoming an anarchist
• Black Power: Politics of Liberation in America — Carmichael and Charles Hamilton — contrasted individual racism with institutional racism
• Planet of the Apes took the place of Tarzan in racist popular culture
• racist panic during the second half of the 20th century of the conquered dark world rising up to enslave the white conquerer
• Eldrigde Cleaver — Soul on Ice, 1968, manifesto of black power masculinity to redeem the tragic colonized male, whose soul was “on ice” whose power was the black eunuch
• Andrew Billingsly, sociologist, Black Families in America — broke ground on antiracist black family studies in 1968, refused to analyze black families from the criteria of white families
• Kerner Commission — blamed racism for urban rebellions — “our nation is moving towards two societies, one black one white, separate and unequal”
• report recommended the allocation of billions of dollars to diversify american policing
• Johnson created more police intelligence units to spy on black power organizations
• increases in federal spending on police weapons, training and riot prep
• King’s death transformed countless doubly conscious activists into singly conscious antiracists — black power grew
• black perspectives, for black people looking at themselves through their own eyes
• black studies and black power ideas in general began to inspire antiracist transformations among non blacks
• Nixon — innovative campaign unveiled the future of racist ideas
• Nixon — demean black peole and praise white people without ever saying black people or white people — southern strategy
• Reagan — fired Angela Davis from UCLA when she was 25
• anti communist regulations was unconstitutional, Davis resumed her post, Reagan began searching for another way to fire her, which he did later on — she was wanted by the FBI
• Nixon — “Only two times when an abortion was necessary — when you have a black and a white or a rape”
• Griggs vs duke power company — racist employers could then simply ensure that their discriminatory hiring and promotion practices were related to job performance and therefore to business necessity
• 1973 — rate of black poverty would dip to its lowest level in us history — income level were rising and political economic racial disparities closing before recession of 1973
• Rocky — creed based on Ali — pride of white supremacy masculinity’s refusal to be knocked out from the avalanche of civil rights and black power protests and policies
• Roots — unearthed legions of racist ideas of backwards africa, of civilizing american slavery, of the contented slave, stupid and imbrued slaves, loose enslaved women, african american roots in slavery
• Reagan — despised by antiracists
• feeding the white backlash to black power
• Carter — cuts in social welfare, health care, educational programs while increasing military spending
• unemployment rates, inflation, falling wages, rising black poverty and increasing inequality
• Regents v Bakke — futility of schools admissions criteria — standardized tests had failed time and again to predict success in college and professional careers or even to truly measure intelligence
• tests had figured out an objective way to rule non whites and women and poor people intellectually inferior, and to justify discriminating against them in the admissions process
• Regents v bakke — discrimination against members of the white majority, allowing bakke to be admitted to college
• four years after, white students were 2.5 x likely than black students to enroll in highly selective colleges and universities, by 2004 that racial disparity had doubled
• Davis: “In a racist society it is not enough to be a non racist, we must be antiracist, 1979
• KKK almost tripled membership between 1971–1980
• early 80’s, one study showed that for every white person killed by police, police killed 22 black peopole
• regagan cut taxes for the rich and social programs for the middle, and low income families while increasing military budget
• first year in office, median income of black families declined by 5.2%, number of poor americans in general increased by 2.2M
• 1982, Regan, War on Drugs
• drug crime was declining, only 2% of americans viewed drugs as the nations most pressing problem
• black youths in 1985 — unemployment rate was 4x what it had been in 1954
• crack had become the latest drug addicting americans to racist ideas — not many stories reported on poor white crack sellers and users
• 1986 — anti drug abuse act — minimum 5 year sentence for a dealer or user caught with five grams of crack — white and rich users had to be caught with 500 grams to receive the same five year minimum sentnece
• mass incarceration of americans — prison quadrupled between 1980–2000 due to stiffer sentences, not more crime
• whites and blacks were selling and consuming illegal drugs at similar rates but he black users and dealers were getting arrested and convicted much more
• certain violent crime rates were higher in black neighborhoods simply because unemployed people were concentrated in black neighborhoods
• paroled without voting rights
• Davis — overall % of babies born to young and single black mothers as opposed to married mothers — not the sheer number of babies born to single black mothers that dramatically rose
• poverty was worse for kids than crack — crack babies were like the science for racist ideas, they never existed
• McClesky v Kemp — justices disconnected racial disparities from racism
• rampant social profi9ling that jumped up the inhumane growth of the black executed and enslaved prison population
• Molefi Kete Asante — afrocentricity — cultural and philosophical center for African people based on african aspiration, visions and concepts
• white workers and professionals had come to widely believe that they must secretly help their racial fellows in the job market, on the false assumption that government polices were helping blacks more than whites
• Magic, got HIV — evolved from a gay white disease, transformed into a black disease, affecting ignorant, hyper sexual, callous marauders, an necessitating putative policies to control them
• Clinton — campaign pledge to end welfare as we know it
• Davis — arguably americas staunchest antiracist voice over the past two decades, unwavering in her search for antiracist explanations when others took the easier and racist way out of Black blame
• Clinton — three strikes and your out, largest crime bill in US history — largest increase of the prison population in US history, mostly on non violent drug offenses
• Hernstein, Murray — The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life — gave standardized tests and the racist ideas underpinning them a new lease on life (1994)
• cognitive difference between blacks and whites is generic (segregationist argument) or cognitive difference between blacks and whites is environment (assimilationist) — they wrote that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences
• New Republicans — Contract with America — “personal responsibility”
• black people, especially poor ones, needed to take personal responsibility for their socioeconomic plight and for racial disparities, and stop blaming racial discrimination for their problems, and depending on government to fix them
• irresponsible black people caused racial inequities, not discrimination
• made sense to encourage the black individual to take more responsibility — racist sense to tell black people as a whole group to do so
• slaveholders racist theory of african americans as more dependent had been dusted off
• segregationist theories that convinced people that the age of racism was over, — that it didn’t exist
• when asked in 1995 (a study) to envision a drug user and describe that person, 95% of respondents described a black face, despite black faces constituting a mere 15% of drug users that year
• clinton said that violence for white people too often has a black face — it’s not racist for whites to assert that the culture of welfare dependency, out of wedlock pregnancy, and absent fatherhood cannot be broken by social programs unless there is first more personal responsibility
• PRWORA — limited federal control of welfare programs, required work for benefits, intserted welfare time limits
• 1996 — CA banned affirmative action by voter vote
• Set It Off (movie) — humanized innercity black perpetuators of illegal acts, and in the process forced viewers to reimagine who real american criminals were
• Gingrich — color blindness rhetoric — idea of solving race problem by ignoring it, started to catch on as logical
• Social psychologist Robert williams coined the term ebonics in 1973 — “we know that ebony means black and that phonics refers to speech sounds or the science of sounds” “science of black speech sounds or language”
• racist hierarchy places “standard” or “proper” english above ebonics
• ebonics had formed from the trees of african languages and modern english, just as modern english had formed from the trees of latin and germanic languages — ebonics was no more broken or nonstandard english than english was broken or nonstandard to german or latin
• racist black blacks believed their success was due to their extraordinary god given qualities and or their extraordinary work ethic
• Craig Venter — worked on human genome project — “the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis”, but segregationists in 1995 tried to figure out something that did not exist: how the races differed genetically
• Venter — greater genetic differences between individuals of the same racial group than between individuals of different groups
• 2000 — tens of thousands of black voters in FLA were barred from voting or had their votes destroyed, allowing W to win by fewer than 500 votes
• only 44% of african americans endorsed the iraq invasion in 2003/73% of whites
• No Child Left Behind — 2003 — regular testing to assess how well the students are doing — ties federal funding to the testing scores — decrease funding to schools that are not making improvements, thus leaving the neediest students behind — victim blaming
• more than 70 percent of students arrested at school during the 09–10 school year were black or latino
• Obama = extraordinary negro
• Katrina — federal officials used media reports to justify their delays — citing dangerous of sending aid and personnel with so many people looting gun stores and shooting at police, rescue officials and helicopters
• Duke University lax case — players acquitted, but the stripper (who lied), her lies were generalized after the acquittal to all black peole, all women, black women
• people wondered whether Obama was “black enough”
• New Yorker ran image of Michelle depicted in military gear, combat boots, AK, large afro — iconic stereotypical image of the strong black woman
• Jeremiah Wright — Obama lumped antiracists with angry anti-white cynics to discredit them and distinguish himself from them — DuBois and MLK ultimately arrived at anti racism, they had to ward off the same “angry” and anti white labels they had helped to produce
• Obama was doing the same thing
• black fathers not living in the home were more likely than fathers of every other racial group to keep contact with their children — legend of the black missing father

• Obama’s 10% increase in non white voters over Kerry in 2003 and the record turnout of young voters won him the presidency
• Glenn Beck — “This guy, I believe, is a racist”
• Michelle Alexander — New Jim Crow (2010) — criminal record today authorizes precisely the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind — in employment, housing, education, public benefits, jury service — those labeled criminals denied the right to vote
• “thug” now an accepted way of calling someone the N word — calling black people inferior or less than
• BLM — in order to truly be antiracist, we must oppose all of the sexism, homophobia, colorist, ethnocentrism, nativism, cultural prejudice, and class bias teeming with racism to harm so many black lives
• without a top 1% hoarding the wealth and power, we would actually benefit the vast majority of white people much more than racism does — not coincidental that slavery kept the vast majority of southern whites poor
• intelligent self interest — stop consuming racist ideas that have endangered so much intelligent self interest over the years
• upwardly mobile black folk have not persuaded away racist ideas or policies
• black is beautiful and ugly, intelligent and unintelligent, law abiding and law breaking, industrious and lazy, those imperfections that make black people human, make them equal to all other imperfectly human groups
• racist policies created out of self interest — need to roll back self interest
• racist policies simply evolved over time
• lawmakers have the power to champion the antiracist cause of immediate equalit
• if racism is eliminated, many white people in the top economic bracket fear that it would eliminate on of the most effective tools they have at their disposal to conquer and control and exploit not only non whites but also both low income and middle income white peole
• eradicate racial discrimination, then racist ideas will be eradicated too
• Lincoln chose to end slavery to save the Union — self interest, but worth it
• most effective protests are fiercely local
• any effective solution to eradicating american racism must involve americans committed to antiracist polices seizing and maintaining power over institutions, neighborhoods, counties, states, nations, world
• principled antiracists in power
• when we fight for humanity, we are fighting for ourselves