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

Kendi begins his study by discussing a ship called the James, moored off the coast of New Hampshire, as it weathered a Category 3 hurricane in 1635. One of the passengers, a minister named Richard Mather, wrote of the event, and how thankful he and 100 other passengers were to survive the storm. Together with his friend John Cotton, Mather began to shape “the New England way,” re-centering the faith and philosophy for which they were persecuted in Britain (16).

From Aristotle, Kendi writes, Puritans came to see “rationales for human hierarchy” that used “a climate theory” to differentiate between skin tones and climates of origin (17). Along with this theory came a theory that humanity has two groups: masters and slaves. This Aristotelian thought became part of Roman thought and then part of early Christianity (17). Even though ideas of “ethnic and religious and color prejudice existed in the ancient world,” Kendi writes, races did not. Still, “the foundations” of racist ideas as well as antiracist and egalitarian ideas were laid (18). Though these thoughts existed, they “did not accompany Aristotle and St. Paul into the modern era, into the new Harvard curriculum, or into the New England mind seeking to justify slavery and the racial hierarchy it produced” (18).

Cotton, writing the first constitution in New England, “imitated the Old England way on slavery” (18). Racist ideas “preceded American slavery, because the need to justify African slavery preceded colonial America,” and so early Puritan settlers did not think much of capturing indigenous prisoners of war and shipping them elsewhere as slaves (19). To trace the roots of this practice, Kendi jumps to 7th-century Africa to explain the “robust trans-Saharan trade” of goods and slaves in Ghana, Mali, and Songhay (19).

The vibrant intellectual communities of Africa produced many influential thinkers, including Ibn Battuta and Ibn Khaldun in North Africa, who read a cosmopolitan array of texts. Ibn Khaldun, in the 14th century, also “used climate theory to justify Islamic enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans and Eastern European Slavs” because of “their remoteness” (20). Unlike later climate justifications, Khaldun claimed that “their inferior conditions were neither permanent nor hereditary,” and that dark-skinned people would physically evolve, in cold environments, and develop straight hair or lighter skin (20).

Khaldun belittled “all the different-looking” slaves, and Kendi notes that “he reinforced the conceptual foundation for racist ideas” (21).

There was also the notion of the Curse of Ham, a curse placed by Noah, a biblical patriarch, upon Canaan, the son of Ham, in the Bible’s Book of Genesis. This curse essentially provided a biblical justification for the enslavement of blacks, and associated “cursed ugly Blackness and slavery” directly (though Khaldun did not buy into this notion) (21). Only when non-black individuals ceased to be enslaved in large numbers did the “curse of Ham” justification rise; “the disempowered curse theory became empowered,” and racist ideas mushroomed (21).

Kendi traces the origin of the idea “that African slavery was natural and normal and holy” to 15th-century Portuguese kings (22). After Portuguese royalty captured Cueta, a Muslim trading city, they began to access the sub-Saharan slave-trade routes. King Afonso V, a later leader, commissioned Gomes Eanes de Zurara to write “the inaugural defense of African slave-trading,” which was also “the first European book on Africans in the modern era” (23). Kendi calls this text the beginning of “the recorded history of anti-Black racist ideas” (23). Justifying African slavery as a “missionary” task eased the transition toward race-based slavery. As Eastern European Slavic communities resisted invaders more successfully, they stymied the flow of Eastern European slaves to Western Europe (23); as a result of these new forces, “Western Europeans began to see the natural Slav(e) not as White, but Black” (23).

Zurara’s account shows diversity among slaves’ skin tone, but also an overarching effect of viewing them “as one people—one inferior people” (24). Zurara built up the “evangelical justification” of the “barbarian” people who “needed not only religious but also civil salvation” (24). “Slavery in Portugal” would be “an improvement over their free state in Africa” (24). Zurara circulated this text, and it continued to circulate around Portugal and its global network of port cities after his death in 1474. By 1506, there was a reprinted, abridged version of the text, and its “racist ideas […] had arrived in the Americas” (25).

Following the line of Portuguese expansion, Kendi turns to Christopher Columbus’s Spain-sponsored arrival in Cuba and the slavery practices that began “almost from” his arrival (25). The Spanish colonists that followed him named indigenous peoples “negros da terra (Blacks from the land)” to extend African racial ideas to a new group of people (25). Many indigenous people died from resisting Spanish forces or illness, and the islands required new labor. So, in 1502, merchant Pedro de Las Casas brought the first African slaves to the Caribbean.

His son, Bartolomé de Las Casas, became the New World’s first priest and invited Dominican friars to Cuba. The friars rejected indigenous Taíno slavery, breaking from official stance, and were recalled, but their sermons stayed with Bartolomé. He traveled to Europe to “conduct a lifelong campaign to ease the suffering of Native Americans” (26). This meant suggesting that “importing African laborers would be better” (26). In this suggestion, he “birthed twins—racist twins that some Native Americans and Africans took in: the myth of the physically strong, beastly African, and the myth of the physically weak Native American who easily died from the strain of hard labor” (27).

After turning Spain to embrace native-saving through African slavery, Las Casas changed his mind just prior to his death. He read Zurara’s text and saw the horrors of slavery, then “lamented Zurara’s attempt” to defend slavery via divine intention (27). He became a “radical extremist,” like, Kendi says, “every antiracist who came after him,” and was condemned after death (27). Despite Bartolomé’s rejection of Zurara, Zurara’s ideas reigned until another man, Leo Africanus, took up the mantle of denigrating Africans (though he was originally from, and enslaved out of, Africa). Kendi writes that Africanus was “[t]he first illustrious African producer of racist ideas,” and that his arrival and subsequent freedom in Europe led him to believe that Europe was superior to Africa (28).

The stories Africanus told, “tying African people to hypersexuality, to animals, and to the lack of reason,” circulated quickly and widely during the 16th century (29). During the period, the British began to work on breaking the Portuguese “monopoly of African slave-trading” (29). They perpetuated established racist traditions, seeking to “explain the radical color differences” they saw (29). They adopted climate theory, at first, but late-century literature of exploration, Kendi suggests, gave a new structure to the racist imagination.

Kendi envisions late-16th-century literature as starting with climate theory: “Africa’s hot sun” would transform “the people into uncivil beasts of burden” (31). But this theory did not last, as explorations to the Arctic showed the Inuit people were also darker-skinned than Europeans. Instead, whiteness connected to Christian holiness; this ideological camp believed in the Curse of Ham. Kendi notes that this was “the first major debate between racists” over how and why Africans were racially inferior, and it divided “curse theorists” and “climate theorists” (32).

As upheaval in England rose, and with it the scrutiny of “morally strict, hyper-dictating, pious Puritans,” Africans became “social mirrors” for bad behavior in England (32). By “normalizing negative behavior” in Africans, writers like George Best could “de-normalize” what they witnessed in their own nation (32). Kendi writes that Puritans took well to the vision of a “civilizing and Christianizing” global mission (33). Through the work of writers like William Perkins, who espoused a vision of master-slave relationships as a “family ordering,” slavery could be masked as moral by assimilationist slaveholders (33). This idea of “equal souls and unequal bodies” would carry through in the words of Cotton and Mather (33).

No matter what their justificatory moves, Kendi writes, British travel writers “ushered in the British age of adventure” (34). Playwrights like Shakespeare and Ben Jonson wrote and were commissioned to write several plays dealing with or referencing racial themes and attitudes. Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness, Kendi writes, “helped renew British determination to expand Britannia to America” (35). In 1607, John Smith settled “North America’s first permanent English settlement” with the help of the local Powhatan people and “returned as a hero to England” in 1609 (36). His “worldly—or rather, racist—opinions” inspired thousands to cross to America (36). Kendi emphasizes the fact that Smith’s ideas were only a continuity of a broad body of literature circulating in England during the period, often motivated and collected by Smith’s mentor, Richard Haklyut.

The first slaves to arrive in America arrived by accident, traded to wealthy landowner Richard Yeardley by pirates who took them from a Spanish slaving ship. Yeardley’s cousin, John Pory, incidentally the translator of Leo Africanus to English, joined him in America and was speaker of the “inaugural meeting of elected politicians in colonial America” (38). Kendi writes that “[t]he English translator of Leo the African’s book, who had defended curse theory, thus became colonial America’s first legislative leader” (38).

Colonial America quickly turned to tobacco as a cash crop and used enslaved Africans and white indentured servants to fuel agricultural growth. The “stratification” of race, and placing black below white, came out in a 1630 rape case (39). A white man punished for raping a “polluted Black woman” was actually punished for defiling his own body; this “first recorded instance of gender racism in America” considered the black woman a “tainted object,” compared to “the pure White woman” (39).

A clear order of power emerged in colonial America, in which powerful men could “acquire fertile land, solicit trade, procure labor, and keep legally free people” enslaved (40). Kendi cites the famous and, at the time, closely-watched case of Elizabeth Key, a biracial women, as she sought the freedom promised to her in her white father’s will. Invoking English common law, which states that Christians could not be enslaved, Key unraveled all “the ties that planters had unofficially used to bind African slavery” (40).

This destabilizing case, along with a slowing of English immigration and high rates of indentured and slave solidarity, led planters to purchase more African slaves. It also led them to pass laws that emphasized the difference between white and black and named a child’s race as coming from her mother, not her father. This allowed slavers to “reap financial reward” for sleeping with black women (41). At the same time, legislators penalized white-woman-nonwhite-man relationships. “In this way,” Kendi writes, “White men freed themselves, through racist laws, to engage in sexual relations with all women” (41). Still, “of the nearly one hundred reports of rape or attempted rape” in fifty years in the colonies, “none reported the rape of a Black woman,” largely because “Black women’s credibility had been stolen by racist beliefs in their hypersexuality” (42).

Though myths of black men’s and women’s desire for “superior whiteness” circulated widely, some white men, Kendi notes, “were honest enough to broadcast their attractions” to black women (43). They justified such attractions via assimilationist ideas. White men like Richard Ligon connected this perceived goodness to a “docile” nature and suggested that “slaves could and should become Christians” without being, by extension, free (44).

In 1660, a scientific group called the “Royal Society” began to circulate ideas about race that claimed “objectivity,” even as they circulated racist ideas (45). One scientist, Robert Boyle, wrote a treatise that circulated widely, from Richard Mather’s son, Increase Mather, to Isaac Newton. Boyle claimed that, in physics, the “whiteness of light” was at the center of everything; this order should extend to the rest of the world, in which white men’s power and dominion should not be restricted (46). Boyle’s treatise diminished the segregationist notion that Africans could not be baptized and lent credence to the rising assimilationist belief that, despite African rejection, missionary efforts should grow. With Boyle behind them, assimilationists in the 1660s worked “to publicize [the] divine duty” of Christianizing “resistant slaveholders and slaves”; this would become the life mission of Cotton Mather, grandson of Richard Mather (46). 

In his fourth chapter, Kendi traces the commingling of Richard Mather’s and John Cotton’s families, as Mather marries Cotton’s widow and his son, Increase, marries Sarah Cotton’s daughter. Increase and Sarah’s first son is Cotton Mather. Kendi argues that “hardly any intellectual was more responsible” for making African slavery sound “natural” to America than Cotton Mather (48).

Kendi describes the lineage of racist thought that influenced Mather, mainly through the work of assimilationist minister Richard Baxter. The idea of “benevolent slavery […] gave convincing power to the idea that slavery was just and should not be resisted” (48), and that “loving masters bought voluntary slaves to save their souls” (49).

As he begins to describe the events of the 1660s and 1670s in Britain, Kendi turns to the drama surrounding John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke questioned the idea that humans of all races were one species, beginning “another new racist debate” over whether “all humans were one species” (monogenesis, espoused by assimilationists), or whether “there were multiple origins of multiple human species” (polygenesis, espoused by segregationists) (50).

In the mid-1670s, while conflict with indigenous peoples ravaged New England during King Philip’s War, a Quaker named William Edmundson first articulated abolitionist (albeit assimilationist) ideas in a letter to his congregation. Kendi calls a related Mennonite and Quaker movement a decade later a truly “antiracist” one, for its founding Petition Against Slavery remarked that “human hierarchies of any kind […] would do little more than oppress all of humanity” (52). Dominant religious leaders both within and outside of Quaker communities rejected these terms and treated them as insignificant.

It was easy to see these ideas as insignificant in the heat of war. Kendi traces the Mather family’s anti-native prayers to show the racial conflict of King Philip’s War consumed even the most pious. At the same time, he points out a multidimensional conflict in Virginia, in which poor whites, local Native Americans, and enslaved Black men came together to fight Governor George Berkeley’s oppressive power. Kendi writes that “[l]uring Whites with pardons and Blacks with liberty,” Berkeley quieted the rebellion; he and other “rich planters learned from Bacon’s rebellion that poor Whites had to be forever separated from enslaved Blacks” (53). They assembled poor White militias to defend against Black uprisings, creating and fueling animosity between the groups.

Cotton Mather was just a teenager during at this time, a prodigy who was already attending Harvard. There, he produced ambitious quantities of sermons and diaries as he tried to find his way, politically and theologically. He and his father, Increase Mather, founded “America’s first formal intellectual group, the Boston Philosophical Society,” an imitation of London’s Royal society, in 1683 (55). The years surrounding the group’s founding saw a new spate of scientific tracts that sought to taxonomize race.

One such tract, by François Bernier, managed to diminish “Black people’s […] humanity” while playing up “their sexual humanity” (56). Africans were physically superior, but white bodies had the rationality that, Bernier claimed, rendered them naturally powerful over black, “animal” populations (56).

Cotton, co-pastor of Boston’s elite North Church, and Increase, the new president of Harvard, were also engaged in political matters. As King Philip’s War ended, the British crown revoked the “chair of autonomy” in Massachusetts and installed a new royal governor (57). The Mathers soon began to lobby King James II. Upheaval continued as William and Mary overthrew James, and during this period of unease, New Englanders “raised the baton of revolt” (57).

In April 1689, Boston Puritans arrested royalists and reinstated their old governor, asserting dominion over their territory. Kendi acknowledges that the area was “unruly,” and that confusion defined the period, but “The Declaration of Gentleman and Merchants,” which he attributes to Mather, is clear in its intention of liberty. It is also clear in its connection between Puritans and slaves: both should be “looked after” by their masters (59). In this text, Mather recalls Baxter’s idea that “the souls of African people were equal to those of the Puritans: they were White and good” (59).

Like Locke, Boyle, Newton, and other thinkers, Mather used the trope of “White” to say that “White symbolized beauty” (60). As Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave shows, assimilated Africans were thought to turn or appear “white” as their “goodness” grew (60). The language of the witch hunt, which rose through the Mathers and their circle in the last decade of the 17th century, “ascribed a Black face to criminality—an ascription that remains to this day” (61).

Even after the witch trials ended, Kendi notes, and condemnations were revoked, Mather “never stopped defending the religious, class, slaveholding, gender, and racial hierarchies reinforced by the trials” (62). Mather’s role as a voice of Christianity gave these hierarchies increased power. He even helped write the charter of the “Religious Society of Negroes,” a short-lived group of enslaved people whose rules prevented them from acting without the wisdom of an English person or taking in a runaway (63).

In his widely-circulated tracts, Mather espoused familiar ideas from Zurara and others that “urbane American slavery was better than barbaric African freedom” (63). As the planting economies of other colonies flourished under these ideas, so too did the intellectual community around Mather in Boston. The slave trade became an “investment craze” (64). Though Mather and other religious leaders tried to persuade enslaved Africans to convert, “the economic craze did not yield a religious craze,” as “planters still shied away from” their arguments (64). Even Anglican ministers, under the authority of the English crown, could not make inroads with conversion.

Stirrings of antislavery sentiment in New England existed despite the dominant idea of “benevolent slavery.” Samuel Sewall, a Boston judge, wrote a tract called “The Selling of Joseph” that rejected “proslavery theories from the quicksand of another kind of racism” (66). Sewall proposed that whites reject both slavery and African people, who “can never live” well within white communities (67).

Unlike the Quaker and Mennonite antislavery leaders, Sewall was a powerful man. But the “close-minded” leaders of “proslavery racism” worked hard to disqualify Sewall (66). In his battle against slaveholder John Saffin, Saffin’s segregationist stance was more appealing to the majority of Bostonians.

In the wake of this disagreement, enslaved people began to “rise noticeably”; those in power responded by adding more “racist codes” that would keep them safe. In so doing, they “rated Indians and Negroes with horses and hogs” (67). Anti-miscegenation laws increased. Black-owned land was seized and given to whites, with freed white servants given fifty acres of land at the end of their service. In what Kendi calls a “story [that] would be told many times in American history,” black people lost land, and “the resulting White prosperity was then attributed to White superiority” (68).

Mather, though, continued in the first decades of the 18th century to espouse the assimilationist argument that enslaved Africans were “Men, and not Beasts” (68). Teaching and baptizing slaves would not mean freeing them. His vision of “Christian slavery” was “more representative in New England” than other racial, and racist, visions (69). Nonetheless, African peoples had been “stamped from the beginning as criminals” for their uprising against their masters; newspapers mostly characterized them as “bought like cattle” and that they were “dangerous criminals” (69).

Kendi makes a brief aside into Mather’s interest in the African practice of inoculation, about which he learns from an enslaved man named Onesimus. He shares the findings with the physicians of Boston, who soundly reject the idea that African medicine could have a solution to such diseases as smallpox. Only one, Zabadiel Boylson, great-uncle of John Adams, took Mather’s advice to heart, inoculating his own son and two Africans. One of the most vocal anti-inoculators, Dr. William Douglass, published his complaints in the New England Courant, which was run at the time by James Franklin, older brother of then-indentured teenage servant Ben Franklin.

After Ben’s brief rebellious turn, publishing anonymous papers using his brother’s workshop, he was invited to Cotton Mather’s house. “The sixty-year-old and seventeen-year-old” met and made peace over the “war of words” that Franklin set into type (72). Though Mather was, at the time, “melancholy” about a period of rejections in his life, many of his “prayers finally began to be answered during his final years” (73). Britain officially “[freed] missionaries and planters from having to free the converted” in 1727, allowing planters to see that “Christian submission could supplement their violence” on plantations (73). Following the Royal Society’s “White ruling standard for humanity,” Mather successfully preached that “African people could become White in their souls,” if not their bodies (75). When he died in 1728, Mather believed that this mission was taking shape.

Kendi notes that this baptizing energy picked up steam until the First Great Awakening, in 1733, in which Jonathan Edwards preached the “human equality (in soul) and the capability of everyone for conversion” (74). In 1740, in South Carolina, Hugh Bryan started to apply antislavery thought to practice on his own plantation. On a greater scale, though, these antiracist sentiments had to fight dominant, assimilationist racist thought that Mather built and disseminated to powerful effect.