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

When Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743, James Blair, missionary to the Virginia Colony, had just died, “marking the end of an era when theologians almost completely dominated the racial discourse in America” (79). Kendi calls this the start of Enlightenment thinking about race in America: the “secularizing and expanding” of “racial discourse throughout the colonies” that would inspire “antislavery, anti-abolitionist, and anti-royal revolutionaries” in Jefferson’s generation (79). He calls Benjamin Franklin, “Cotton Mather’s greatest secular disciple,” the leader of this movement (79).

As Franklin and others brought Enlightenment thinking from Europe to America, they perpetuated the idea that “White” was “a metaphor for Europeanness, and therefore Whiteness” (80). Franklin called slavery “uneconomical” (80). At the same time, he and Enlightenment thinkers “gave legitimacy” to the racist “connection between lightness and Whiteness and reason” and “darkness and Blackness and ignorance” (81).

Trade thrived during the 18th century era of Enlightenment. This “new intellectual and commercial age” required continued racist writing that could “[cloud] the discrimination” and “[rationalize] the racial disparities” involved in global economic systems (82). Carl Linnaeus took up François Bernier’s call to taxonomize humans into separate species; his “human hierarchy was based on race” (82).