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Polygenesis
Segregationist is the term Kendi uses to describe the most blatant form of racism, which involves believing that black people are inherently, permanently inferior to white people, and that black people are themselves to blame for racial disparities. Segregationist thinking tends to be explicit and overt than assimilationist thinking.
Segregationist Quotes in Stamped from the Beginning
The Stamped from the Beginning quotes below are all either spoken by Segregationist or refer to Segregationist. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 9: Created Equal
Quotes
The ambitious politician, maybe fearful of alienating potential friends, maybe torn between Enlightenment antislavery and American proslavery, maybe honestly unsure, did not pick sides between polygenesists and monogenesists, between segregationists and assimilationists, between slavery and freedom. But he did pick the side of racism.
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Chapter 24: Great White Hopes
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“North American negroes… in culture and language,” Boas said, were “essentially European.” Boas was “absolutely opposed to all kind of attempts to foster racial solidarity,” including among his own Jewish people. He, like other assimilationists, saw the United States as a melting pot in which all the cultural colors became absorbed together (into White Americanness). Ironically, assimilationists like Boas hated racial solidarity, but kept producing racist ideas based on racial solidarity.
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Chapter 27: Old Deal
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Beginning around 1940, Columbia anthropologist Ruth benedict, a student of Franz Boas, dropped the term “racism” into the national vocabulary. “Racism is an unproved assumption of the biological and perpetual superiority of one human group over another,” she wrote in Race: Science and Politics (1940). She excused her class of assimilationists from her definition, though […] As assimilationists took the helm of racial thought, their racist ideas became God’s law, nature’s law, scientific law, just like segregationist ideas over the past century. Assimilationists degraded and dismissed the behaviors of African people and somehow projected the idea that they were not racist, since they did not root those behaviors in biology, did not deem perpetual, spoke of historical and environmental causes, and argued that Blacks were capable of being civilized and developed.
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Chapter 30: The Act of Civil Rights
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And so, as much as the Civil Rights Act served to erect a dam against Jim Crow policies, it also opened the floodgates for new racist ideas to pour in, including the most racist idea to date: it was an idea that ignored the White head start, presumed that discrimination had been eliminated, presumed that equal opportunity had taken over, and figured that since Blacks were still losing the race, the racial disparities and their continued losses must be their fault. Black people must be inferior, and equalizing policies—like eliminating or reducing White seniority, or instituting affirmative action policies—would be unjust and ineffective. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 managed to bring on racial progress and the progression of racism at the same time.
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Chapter 35: New Republicans
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The campaign for California’s Proposition 209 ballot initiative displayed the progression of racist ideas in their full effect: its proponents branded antiracist affirmative action as discriminatory, named the campaign and ballot measure the “civil rights initiative,” evoked the “dream” of Martin Luther King Jr. in an advertisement, and put a Black face on the campaign.
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Get the entire Stamped from the Beginning LitChart as a printable PDF.
Segregationist Term Timeline in Stamped from the Beginning
The timeline below shows where the term Segregationist appears in Stamped from the Beginning. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Prologue
...been three main camps of thought about these racial disparities between Black and white people. Segregationists argue that the disparities are due to Black people’s supposed inferiority to white people. Antiracists...
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...inequality of white and black races […] [was] stamped from the beginning.” This is a segregationist statement, which means it is more obviously recognizable as racist than an assimilationist statement would...
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People rarely admit to being racist; instead, both segregationist and assimilationist ideas are disguised as being morally good, while for much of American history...
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Chapter 7: Enlightenment
...suggesting that Africans and Europeans do not emerge from a common ancestor. This is a segregationist view and one that enslavers embrace. At the same time, Voltaire is against slavery, a...
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...truly two different species, it wouldn’t make sense that they could have children together. Yet segregationists and polygenesists are not so easily swayed by this argument. The supposed wrongness and aberration...
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Chapter 8: Black Exhibits
...to repeat “a few words plainly.” Hume is an abolitionist, but nonetheless also a staunch segregationist.
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Chapter 9: Created Equal
...right efforts, Black people will one day prove worthy of being counted as full persons—and segregationists, who consider the 3/5 designation permanent. All explicit references to slavery are removed from the...
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Chapter 11: Big Bottoms
A segregationist anatomist who at the time is “Europe’s most distinguished intellectual,” Georges Cuvier, spends days observing...
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Chapter 12: Colonization
The Sierra Leone plan is unsuccessful, however by this point a large coalition of influential leaders—segregationists, assimilationists, anti- and proslavery figures alike—are invested in the prospect of removing Black people from...
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Chapter 16: The Impending Crisis
...races. His comments about the future of the races are interpreted differently by assimilationists and segregationists, who both praise the text. Assimilationists believe Darwin proposes that Black people will “evolve into...
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Chapter 21: Renewing the South
...that this positive relation is now returning. This is also the moment at which the segregationist fiction of “separate but equal” is born. The idea that Black people were aided and...
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Chapter 22: Southern Horrors
...voters to be granted election supervision if they request it from the federal government. Southern segregationists call this anti-discrimination bill “hateful.” Many Southern states introduce literacy tests and other methods to...
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...insisted that white supremacy will and should always exist in America. At this point, the segregationist policies that already exist throughout the South are confirmed to be legal.
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Chapter 23: Black Judases
...the U.S. acquires Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War. Both segregationists and antiracists oppose U.S. imperialism, though for different reasons; assimilationists support it, and for the...
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...he defends antiracist thought against assimilationist accusations that opposing racism was just as bad as segregationist thinking.
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...T. Washington to the White House. Black communities across the nation celebrate this event, while segregationists furiously denounce it. In 1903, Du Bois publishes what will become his most famous work,...
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Chapter 24: Great White Hopes
...the Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 presidential election. Once elected, Wilson compromises with Southern segregationists, thereby cementing Jim Crow.
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Chapter 25: The Birth of a Nation
Eugenicists and other segregationists vehemently oppose interracial marriage and reproduction, stressing the importance of upholding the “purity of the...
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...collection entitled Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. In this book, Du Bois argues that segregationist beliefs in Black inferiority are not produced by ignorance but by passionate belief and thus...
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...“racial amalgamation.” While Du Bois denounces Harding in The Crisis, Garvey supports a separatist—though not segregationist—approach to race relations. These two positions reflect broader splits among the Black American community between...
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Chapter 27: Old Deal
...the New Deal. In order to pass this legislation in Congress, Roosevelt capitulates to the segregationist desires of Southern Democrats. Abandoned by the government, Black people in the South develop their...
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If Roosevelt hadn’t been so “beholden to his party’s segregationists,” 1933 could have been a year of landmark progress against racism in the U.S. In...
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...biological and perpetual superiority of one human group over another.” This definition notably only includes segregationists, not the assimilationists who at this point have taken “the helm of racial thought.”
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Chapter 28: Freedom Brand
...accept that humans (and thus racial groups) are shaped by both genes and social conditions, segregationists still fight to insist that Africans generally have the fewest good genes. Moreover, it is...
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...the problem with assuming that Black schools could never deliver quality education on their own. Segregationists and antiracists both praise Hurston’s view; unsurprisingly, assimilationists denounce it. Even as desegregation is now...
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Chapter 29: Massive Resistance
...patronizing attitude of the “white moderate.” At the same time, he conflates defiant antiracists with segregationists. By this point, a growing number of Black people have become disillusioned with King’s nonviolence...
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Chapter 32: Law and Order
...but knows that by being too explicit, he will only attract the support of hardcore segregationists, a minority of the larger group of racist voters. Instead he pursues what historians call...
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...efforts to fire her, citing her condemnation of a UC Berkeley psychologist whose research supports segregationist ideas.
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Chapter 33: Reagan’s Drugs
...Davis is one of a number of antiracist scholars who rebuke this new stream of segregationist thought. In 1981 she publishes her famous Women, Race, and Class, “a revisionist history of...
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Chapter 35: New Republicans
...They accuse her of attempting to incite a race war, echoing the accusations of Southern segregationists earlier in the 20th century and enslavers in the 19th. Although in some ways racist...
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In this moment, segregationist thinking is bolstered by the establishment of white supremacist websites. Yet assimilationist ideas are also...
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Chapter 36: 99.9 Percent the Same
...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...
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Chapter 37: The Extraordinary Negro
...He labels antiracist anger as unhelpful and draws a false equivalence between them and angry segregationists. He refuses to condemn white bigots and reactionaries, declining to even acknowledge them as racist....
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Republican segregationists remain steadfast in their opposition to Obama, investing in a conspiracy surrounding his birth certificate...
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Epilogue
...exist between the Black and white communities. Yet despite being silenced by both assimilationists and segregationists, antiracists keep fighting. They join the Occupy movement of 2011, demand reparations for slavery, fight...
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