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Chapter 23: Black Judases
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Stamped from the Beginning, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Discrimination, Racist Ideas, and Ignorance
Segregationists and Assimilationists vs. Antiracists
Media, Institutions, and the Transmission of Knowledge
The Invention of Blackness and Whiteness
The Illogic of Racism
Summary
Analysis
In 1906, the famous German-Jewish anthropologist Franz Boas arrives at Atlanta University, where Du Bois is hosting a conference entitled “The Health and Physique of the Negro-American.” Two days later, Boaz gives a commencement address in which he stuns the audience by rejecting the notion that Black people are inferior and describing the “glories of precolonial West African kingdoms.”
It’s certainly possible to make an argument against the idea of Black inferiority without describing the rich and impressive cultures that existed in precolonial Africa. But Kendi implies here that, given how much of African history is erased and misconstrued, properly acknowledging these cultures is vitally important.
Themes
By the end of that same year, President Theodore Roosevelt reacts to devastating results for the Republicans in the midterm elections by discharging the 25th Infantry Regiment, a Black military unit that had been “a huge source of Black pride.” Horrified by the fact that the soldiers were discharged over an obviously false accusation, the majority of Black voters come to despise the Roosevelt administration. Meanwhile, scholars across the country (including Du Bois himself) continue to prop up the false idea that Black people’s criminality is partly to blame for lynchings.
The tragic story of the 25th Infantry Regiment is yet another example Kendi gives of white American leaders using Black people as political pawns.
Themes
Black boxing superstar Jack Johnson achieves a historical victory at the heavyweight championships semifinal in Australia. Much is made of the fact that Johnson’s wife is white; he explains that he refuses to date Black women because they will not “spoil” and “pamper” their men. These comments, Kendi writes, indicate the extent to which Johnson has internalized racist fictions. Jim Jeffries, the former heavyweight champion nicknamed the “Great White Hope,” comes out of retirement to challenge Johnson. The upcoming match triggers a surge of racist violence. However, the match never even takes place: Johnson is arrested on fabricated charges, flees the country for seven years, and spends a year in jail on his return.
It is of course deeply wrong for the media to be so scandalized by Johnson’s interracial relationship, which is based in deeply racist ideas about “pure” white womanhood and the supposed transgression of interracial sex. At the same time, Kendi points out that Johnson’s comments about Black women are also wrong and perpetuate the double-bind of racism and sexism Black women are forced to endure.
Themes
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Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1912 novel Tarzan helps repair the damage to white masculinity that Jack Johnson has wrought. This profoundly racist book depicts a white man brought up by monkeys and features “ape-Africans” who are both sexually aggressive and “childlike.” Its enormous popularity endures for decades.
Readers might recall Tarzan from Disney’s film adaptation of the story, which does not seem to have any obvious racial overtones. Yet as Kendi explains here, the entire premise of the original story is a powerful conduit of racist ideas.
Themes
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Du Bois, meanwhile, has become embroiled in a debate with William Lloyd Garrison’s grandson, Oswald Garrison Villard, the “darling of White liberal America.” At this point, Du Bois has moved from Atlanta to New York in order to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s journal, The Crisis. Villard is a cofounder of the NAACP and had tried to push Ida Wells out of the organization due to his feeling that she was insufficiently humble and that her antiracism was too steadfast. By 1910, both Social Darwinism and eugenics have come to play a serious role in American intellectual life, despite a marked lack of evidence to support eugenicists’ beliefs.
Kendi notes the contrast between the fact that Ida Wells’ views are considered too extreme for the NAACP and the fact that eugenics and Social Darwinism are taken seriously as academic fields to highlight how warped the perception of intellectual legitimacy is at this time. As a committed antiracist, Ida Wells is one of few figures who is truly able to access the full truth (rather than what is subsumed in racist fictions). Yet it is these fictions—not Wells—that continue to be taken seriously.
Themes
Du Bois lambasts eugenics and other forms of “race prejudice” in The Crisis. Boas, meanwhile, champions the idea of the U.S. as a diverse “melting pot” where all races eventually assimilate into whiteness. In 1911, he writes the preface for a book by NAACP cofounder Mary White Ovington that blames Black women’s apparently wayward behavior on the “higher ratio of Black women to men.” Ida B. Wells denounces this book in strongly antiracist terms. Meanwhile, Du Bois dedicates a section in The Crisis to talented individuals break through “racial barriers” to become the first Black person to perform a particular achievement.
The idea of the “melting pot” is often perceived to be innocuous and even positive, a representation of the ways in which distinct ethnic and racial all bring unique contributions to American society. However, as Kendi indicates here, the “melting pot” can also be understood to represent the sinister aspiration that every form of racial and ethnic difference in the nation will eventually collapse into whiteness.
Themes
Du Bois dedicates an issue of The Crisis to the topic of women’s suffrage. In general, the argument used in favor of white women’s suffrage—that women have an “innate (childlike) morality”—does not appear in the issue. However one contributor, Nannie H. Burroughs, argues that whereas Black men are more weak-willed, Black women can be trusted not to “sell out” their vote. It is possible that Burroughs still feels resentment over the “loud minority” of Black men—including Du Bois—who chose to vote for the Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 presidential election. Once elected, Wilson compromises with Southern segregationists, thereby cementing Jim Crow.
Stamped from the Beginning contains many reminders that even those who fought for progressive goals (such as women’s suffrage) often did so using problematic and regressive arguments (such as the idea that women are inherently moral in the same way as children). While some might argue that the end justifies the means, Kendi’s analysis of racist ideas has shown how relying on destructive ideas to make one’s argument is usually unhelpful and outright harmful.
Themes
For the White House’s first-ever film screening, President Wilson chooses the profoundly racist Birth of a Nation (1915). This film actively fuels the lynching crisis still gripping the nation by featuring a violent Black man who attempts to rape a white woman (who commits suicide in order to escape). Black people across the U.S. protest the film. Du Bois, meanwhile, publishes The Negro, a work of history that challenges racist myths. By this point, he has “seemingly dropped his biological concept of race.”
This passage provides a further challenge to the narrative of racial progress that is so often invoked to describe American history. While cinema drastically transforms society, bringing vivid new worlds into people’s perception, Kendi suggests that in reality this new medium is often deeply regressive and racist.
Themes
