Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

Most of the historical figures discussed in the first four sections of the book are men, but the book stresses the critical role of Black women in the development of antiracist ideology. When Reynolds discusses Sojourner Truth, who produced a memoir in 1850 that told the story of her enslavement, he says, “Up until this point, women had been left out of the conversation around slavery” (94). Enslaved women faced the additional horror and burden of frequent rape and forced pregnancy—by white or Black fathers—to expand the slave population. White people, including intellectuals and physicians, long sexualized and silenced Black women, but conversations about slavery, and indeed about Black people in general, tended to ruminate on the alleged savagery of Black masculinity and the invented threats that free Black men would pose to society. After slavery, racist commentators took careful care to continue to demonize Black men as threats to the purity of white women, another sexist stereotype.

The book also mentions Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who researched and published data of lynching reports in 1892. She found that “White men were lying about Black-on-White rape and hiding their own assaults of Black women” (121), wantonly lynching Black men before police even charged them with rape. As Wells-Barnett encouraged the Black community to resist, her antiracist literature caused racists to target her and burn her newspaper office in Memphis, Tennessee.

A larger wave of influential activism, art, and literature produced by Black women came in the 20th century. Besides the important Black feminist theory created by Angela Davis, many other Black female artists and authors—including Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and Michele Wallace—produced works that explored the unique experiences of Black women and, in some cases, Black women within the LGBTQ+ community. These decisive additions to Black art and culture gained visibility in the 1970s and 1980s, but Reynolds reminds the reader that Black women had “been the steadying stick from the moment the conversation [about racism] began” (197).

When rap and hip-hop took off, women rappers produced popular albums alongside men. Conversations became more intersectional with the work of Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, which acknowledged the relationships and distinctions between identifying categories like race, gender, and class.

In addition to stressing the relentless antiracist work of Angela Davis for decades, Reynolds acknowledges that much of the most visible activism in the 21st century, particularly the Black Lives Matter movement, has been “led by young Black women,” and that those “antiracist daughters of Davis” represent the greatest hope and example for winning the fight for true racial equality (243).

The authors provide numerous examples reflecting the basic premise of the history of racist ideas in the US: that powerful people create racist ideas to justify racist policy and then deliver the ideas for popular consumption. Even in the earliest years that the book discusses, long before Europeans settled in the Western hemisphere, popular books sensationalized slavery and depicted Black “savagery” and inferiority. The Portuguese historian Gomes Eanes de Zurara wrote The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea in the mid-15th century, “the first defense of African slave trading” (6). This book encouraged Christianization of captive Africans instead of the more popular practice of enslaving eastern Europeans without advancing a major missionary goal. Those that read and appreciated his book took to heart the notion of African savagery, a concept then continually employed in ensuing works about Africa.

Works along the eastern seaboard in the Colonial America reiterated ideas of both African savagery and the debate about converting captives to Christianity. Again, missionary work, viewed as a benevolent goal, justified captivity.

Other racist ideas focused on justifying slavery by asserting the naturalness of African inferiority and subservience. Some claimed that the hot African climate burned their skin and made them animals. Some claimed that Africans had a completely different origin story than Europeans, and therefore the two groups were different species. Others suggested that Africans were the cursed descendants of the Biblical Ham. What these narratives had in common was the insistence that there was something wrong with and fundamentally different about Black people and that they’re savages, suited for slavery.

These central racist claims and their implications morphed over time, finding expression in a variety of media and in developing vocabularies. After the abolition of slavery, myths about Black savagery justified official and unofficial policies that disenfranchised, terrorized, and killed Black people. D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, “Hollywood’s first blockbuster film” (136), justified the rampant violence of the Ku Klux Klan by situating it as a heroic response to Black predation of innocent white women. President Woodrow Wilson screened the movie at the White House. Racists in the entertainment industry and politics both disseminated this popular imagery that excused white violence and demonized Black people.

The book also discusses the 1912 book Tarzan of the Apes and the 1968 movie The Planet of the Apes. Though produced decades apart, both works are united in their equation of Black people with apes. In the book, white masculinity triumphs over Black masculinity—a dynamic that white sports fans tried and failed to recreate in the boxing ring—much to the delight of racist readers. In the movie, Black savagery triumphs over white society, much to the horror of racist audiences who feared Black supremacy in real life.

In the final section of the book, political discourse and law enforcement legislation set up Black people for swift and increased incarceration. Politicians and intellectuals defended the results by inventing terms like “crack baby” to insist that an entire generation of Black babies were doomed for degeneration because their parents used drugs and “super predator” to describe adolescent Black boys (207, 222). These terms perpetuated the old mythology of Black savagery and criminality, no longer to keep Black people in bondage but to keep them in prison and out of the body politic.