Stamped from the Beginning: Chapter 36: 99.9 Percent the Same Summary & Analysis

As the new millennium approaches, investment in the idea of “multiculturalism” takes over the U.S. Many proudly describe the U.S. as a multicultural nation yet fail to acknowledge that if this were really true, Christianity, the English language, and other white European customs would not all be the norm. In 1998, Davis publishes a landmark study of sexuality, gender, race, and class in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, and in 2003 she follows this with the abolitionist manifesto, Are Prisons Obsolete? In it, she argues that in the U.S., the figure of the “criminal” has effectively been coded as Black.

Back in 1973, the social psychologist invented the term “Ebonics” to replace “Nonstandard Negro English” as the descriptor of the distinct vernacular language of Black Americans. In 1996, the Oakland Unified School District recognized Ebonics as a distinct and legitimate language with roots in West Africa. This antiracist gesture was controversial, with even some Black figures lamenting it as a form of “teaching down” to Black children. Ebonics was castigated as “lazy,” “mutant,” and “ungrammatical.” Some assimilationists supported the use of Ebonics in the classroom but only if it was in service of teaching “standard” English.

Conservative Black linguist John McWhorter argued that allowing bilingual education for Ebonics-speaking students was “self-sabotaging.” He claimed that white racism barely existed anymore and that Black people needed to let go of their “victimology.” He also claims that Black children would bully those who perform well in school for “acting White.” This latter issue, while not always complete untrue, is far more complex than McWhorter allows. Three years later, McWhorter goes on to argue that the majority of Black people blame the “culture-internal ideologies” of the Black community itself for the ongoing struggles and disparities it faces in Essays for the Black Silent Majority. In reality, only a minority of Black people hold this view—and they do not tend to be “silent” about it.

In June 2000, President Clinton holds a special event at the White House in which he unveils the first survey of the human genome and proudly announces that scientists have found “that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.” In the wake of this announcement, many segregationists continue to insist that the 0.1% of differentiation in human genes “must be racial.” In reality, this is not true at all, as University of Pennsylvania scholar Dorothy Roberts describes in Fatal Invention, which examines how race is a “political category” that is falsely assumed to be biological.

In the 2000 presidential election, tens of thousands of Black Floridians are unable to vote (or do not have their votes counted), which allows George W. Bush to narrowly win the electoral college and thus the presidency. In August 2001, one of the biggest antiracist meetings in history takes place in Durban, South Africa. The United Nations World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance is attended by 12,000 people. However, the antiracist movement suffers a serious setback in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11. With anti-Islamic and anti-Arab racism on the rise and a new war in Iraq on the horizon, critical examination of U.S. anti-Black racism diminishes.

In 2003, the Supreme Court upholds the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policy in a ruling that comes as a surprise to many. However, standardized testing still remains firmly in place, fueled by the 2003 No Child Left Behind Act, which continues to place blame for achievement disparities on Black children themselves. The Act’s “No Excuses” maxim means that Black and Latinx children often find that the punishment for acting out in school is arrest. Meanwhile, Bill Cosby goes on what is nicknamed his “blame-the-poor tour,” giving a series of talks across the country in which he condemns poor Black people as responsible for the problems they face. A young, freshly elected Illinois senator named Barack Obama criticizes Cosby, pointing out that it is impossible for Black people to take “responsibility” without adequate resources.