Hypocrisy in Leadership
Throughout Stamped, Reynolds and Kendi encourage the reader to question the narratives that are often taught in American history books. Although historians are often quick to place leaders into boxes that characterize them as "good" or "bad," the authors reiterate that human nature is not so simple. In this way, Reynolds and Kendi reiterate the importance of not hastily jumping to moral conclusions when analyzing the key figures in American history. Instead, it is necessary to analyze the policies and actions of each individual and understand the complex contradictions therein. More specifically, the authors highlight the hypocrisy shown by the leaders that have a widely-deemed "heroic" legacy, such as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.
Thomas Jefferson has long been viewed as a forefather of American independence. In the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln was celebrated as the "Great Emancipator." However, Jefferson held overtly racist views and drafted legislation that further disenfranchised slaves and promoted racism. Although Jefferson published essays denouncing slavery for its immorality, he himself owned hundreds of slaves and depended entirely on their labor for his own economic prosperity. Jefferson's most famous line in the Declaration of Independence asserted that "all men are created equal." However, Stamped points out that slaves were entirely omitted from this piece of legislature. Clearly, Jefferson's academic and moral perspectives contradicted his real-world actions. Jefferson's choices ultimately embedded racism within the legislative foundations of the United States.
Similarly, Abraham Lincoln held self-contradictory viewpoints during his presidency. Like Jefferson, Lincoln was inextricably tied to the economic benefits of slavery. His argument for abolition was grounded in his belief that the livelihood of white agricultural workers was threatened by black slaves. Lincoln wanted to abolish slavery from an economic perspective in order to boost the white agrarian economy, but he was adamant about the fact that Black people should not have equal rights. Although he has been praised throughout history as the single figure that abolished slavery, this narrative erases the fact that runaway slaves advocated effectively for their own liberation.
In highlighting the hypocrisy that has dominated American leadership, Stamped encourages its readers to consider the truth behind the stories that comprise American history books. Stamped offers a perspective that has often been erased. However, understanding the complex and cruel history of the United States allows today's citizens to better understand how to combat institutional racism.
Storytelling and Harmful Media Representation
Storytelling forges connections between people, places, and ideas. Although stories have the potential to educate large audiences and bring about positive change, they can also spread harmful narratives with profound, real-world consequences. In the opening chapters of Stamped, Reynolds and Kendi discuss the rise of chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara as the "World's First Racist." Although the Portuguese monarchy enslaved Africans beginning in the fifteenth century, Zurara's storytelling was especially harmful in its depiction of the African people as "savage" and "worthy of conquest." This story was widely repeated throughout Europe and thus became the justification for the European colonization of Africa. In Stamped, Kendi and Reynolds reclaim the role of chronicler in order to tell a different story, depicting the horrific realities of slavery. The authors encourage the audience to recognize the inherent bias that permeates historical chronicles as a means to identify and deconstruct racism.
Although Zurara may have been one of the first writers to explicitly assert his belief that Africans were genetically and culturally "inferior," many other intellectuals have contributed to this narrative throughout history. American thinkers such as John Locke and Benjamin Franklin, who have long been heralded as some of the most influential figures in the Enlightenment era, asserted similar claims in their writings. As Stamped progresses, it uses stories that depicted African savages, devils, and criminals to show how negative media representation of Black people profoundly shaped racist American attitudes, and how these attitudes were later transformed into racist American laws. For example, D.W. Griffith's 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, depicted Black people as predators who would stalk and rape white women. This fear seeped deeply into the American psyche and led to a disproportionate amount of lynchings of innocent Black men.
Black Culture as American Culture
Throughout history, black artists have formed and shaped what is now considered "American culture." It is important to note that these artistic movements were born as acts of resistance. In the early 20th century, W.E.B. Du Bois and other leaders advocated for a representation of Black life as conventional and morally "perfect." Du Bois's idea of perfection was based on white society's moral, political, and aesthetic standards. However, many Black artists found that striving for this "artistic perfectionism" failed to chronicle the real-life struggles, complexities, and realities of Black American life in the 20th century. As a result, Black artists pushed back against Du Bois's proposition and began to create art that resembled their daily lives. This pushback sparked the Harlem Renaissance—an intellectual, social, and artistic movement spanning the 1920s. During the Harlem Renaissance, artists produced notable works of poetry, fine art, and music that chronicled the Black experience. The Harlem Renaissance profoundly shaped the American arts presence on a global scale.
Decades later, in the 1990s, hip hop became an important tool used by poets and musicians to express their disillusionment with the American political system. Hip hop demonstrated how art could be used as an overt demonstration of political resistance. Hip hop music spread throughout the world and inspired artists in different countries to adopt the genre. As time has progressed and society has transitioned to a digital age, black artistic culture has become even more widely distributed and conflated with American culture.
White Fear
As discussed in other sections, white American society has long feared Black people. From Cotton Mather's witch trials as a way to demonize Black bodies, to D.W. Griffith's depiction of Black men as rapists and threats to the white patriarchy, Blackness has been portrayed as devilish, savage, and sinister for centuries. Stamped shows how white people in society's ruling class have enacted laws that preserve power dynamics, maintain the status quo, and disenfranchise Black people.
One instance of white fear that the authors document occurs right before the turn of the 19th century. Reynolds and Kendi investigate the Haitian Revolution, which took place in 1791. During the revolution, the Africans in Haiti defeated French colonists. As a result of this victory, Haiti was hailed as a symbol of resistance, solidarity, and freedom in the Western hemisphere. Following the Haitian revolution, many slaveholders that were also American policymakers (for example, Thomas Jefferson) feared that American slaves would be inspired by the Haitian insurrection and enact their own. This was partially true, as there were many attempted slave revolts in the early 19th century. Although many of these attempted revolts were thwarted before they came to fruition, society began to fear Black people and their potential revolutionary actions. As a response to this fear, Jefferson began to promote the idea of shipping slaves back to Africa so that they could be removed from American society. In this way, Jefferson failed to see slaves as humans. Instead, he merely wanted to capitalize on free slave labor and then erase this population from American society.
White fear has continued to persist in various iterations. In the 1960s, many Americans feared the Black Power movement and Black-led activist movements. Malcolm X was feared for his approach to civil rights, and he was later depicted as "violent" and "threatening" by popular media outlets. Stamped argues that police brutality is a direct consequence of the widespread fear of Blackness.
Black Masculinity and White Women
Beginning in the 19th century, Black masculinity has been depicted as a threat to white masculinity. This perspective was largely shaped by the storytelling and art of the era. Stamped shows that D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation profoundly affected how white men viewed Black men. In the film, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is depicted as a heroic force needed to preserve American values and structure. In addition, Black men (played by white actors in blackface) were portrayed as sexually-lewd clowns and minstrels that preyed on white women. This representation shaped the perception of black masculinity in society. Due to the alleged threat that Black men posed to the white patriarchal social order, laws were passed that banned interracial marriages. In addition, journalists such as Ida B. Wells proved that numerous black men were unjustly accused and killed for "making advances" on white women. These attacks included the brutal murder of Emmett Till, who was lynched for making "physical and verbal advances" towards a white woman in 1955. Till was fourteen years old.
The authors also tell the story of Jack Johnson, a Black boxer and arguably one of the first Black pop-culture celebrities in the United States. Johnson was married to a white woman, which was considered taboo at the time. In addition, Johnson was known for making eccentric style choices and drawing attention to his physical appearance. White America was threatened by Johnson's success and cultural power. As a direct response to Jack Johnson and his growing celebrity, author Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Tarzan of the Apes. In Tarzan, the main character protects a white woman from being killed by Africans. The book became a sensation and continued the harmful narrative that Black men were a threat to social order.
Loophole Laws
Throughout the history of the United States, numerous laws were enacted with amendments that benefitted white people while controlling and imprisoning the Black population. In this way, Stamped demonstrates how racism is not just an interpersonal attitude, but is also embedded in the laws that govern our nation.
Stamped recounts the socioeconomic difficulties that plagued the United States in the 17th century. During this time, white indentured servants began to stand in solidarity with Black slaves. Both groups were disenfranchised due to the capitalist agrarian economy, and they were kept in poverty in order to support the wealth of their bosses. In order to prevent this solidarity from materializing, laws were enacted to privilege white indentured servants over black slaves. Freed white servants were awarded fifty acres of land in order to facilitate their own autonomy, while Black slaves were condemned to working and were classified as livestock. Although there were tensions among socioeconomic classes, rich white landowners enacted racist laws in order to "restore social order" and make Black people the common enemy.
Centuries later, in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan prosecuted the “War on Drugs,” started by Nixon in the 1960s. This crackdown specifically targeted the poor and Black populations. Although white and Black people were selling and using drugs at similar rates, various laws made it so that Black people were increasingly incarcerated and policed in their own neighborhoods. From 1991 to 2001, nine times as many Black people as white people went to federal prison for crack offenses. Black people’s sentences for crack were, on average, double that for white crack offenders in federal court during that period: 148 months compared to 84 months. Stamped shows how laws were drafted in order to exempt white people from crimes while simultaneously reprimanding disproportionate percentages of Black citizens.
The Harmful Rhetoric of “Assimilationists”
In the opening chapter of the book, assimilationists are defined as individuals that want racial integration, but not the full dismantling of oppressive systems. The authors point out that many prominent leaders, both Black and White, can be classified as assimilationists. Throughout history, Black people have been prompted to fit into a “White mold” in order to "be deserving" of their freedom. This idea would later become the cornerstone of assimilationist thought. In the words of Kendi, "Assimilationist ideas are racist ideas because they are based on the assumption that there is something wrong with another racial group that needs changing or something right with our racial group that doesn’t need changing."
Instead of using Phillis Wheatley to address the racism embedded within the American educational institution, white intellectuals used Wheatley's success to defend their assimilationist perspectives. Leaders such as Benjamin Franklin asserted the idea that Wheatley was an "exceptional" scholar amidst her Black "uncivilized" peers. Black people were never "dumb" like white elites suggested—rather, slaves were deprived of intellectual resources because they were forced to be laborers. The tokenization of Phillis Wheatley demonstrates how assimilationist thought is particularly harmful.
At the beginning of his career, W.E.B. Du Bois was a staunch assimilationist who advocated for Black people to compete with the white population. He prided himself on his Harvard education, and he blamed Black people for their own subjugation. As Du Bois's career continued, he confronted his own internalizations of white supremacy. Du Bois's assimilationist viewpoints did not propel the movement forward, but rather prompted Black people to erase their struggles in order to be deemed as "acceptable" by white society. Eventually, Du Bois came to realize that his beliefs were rooted in his own experience as an educated, biracial man from Massachusetts, and he realized that his arguments were not applicable to Black people that did not have the socioeconomic and educational privileges. Ida B. Wells, a Black female journalist, helped contribute to antiracist rhetoric through her reporting of violence against Black men. Wells was one of the figures that prompted Du Bois to radicalize his politics.
In Stamped, Kendi and Reynolds explain that most people are assimilationists. A majority of people acknowledge that slavery was morally wrong, but they fail to see its legacy and how racism continues today. By investigating the harmful rhetoric of assimilationists, Kendi and Reynolds encourage their readers to be antiracists and actively combat racism in all of its iterations.
