Prof. Ibram X. Kendi: Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

Eric Arneson I teach and work at George Washington University down the road I am the co-chair of this seminar and with me today is Philippa strum who is the other co-chair of the seminar Christian Osterman the longtime founder and co-director of this seminar is on sabbatical in Germany this term the Washington history seminar is a collaborative effort of the American historical associations National History Center and the Woodrow Wilson international center for scholars in the history and public policy program in particular we are dependent upon the generosity of a number of institutions for pulling this thing off Schaffer the Society of historians of American foreign relations is a longtime sponsor of this seminar as is the department of history at the George Washington University behind-the-scenes Amanda Perry of the National History Center and Pete Pierce Decker of the Wilson Center worked to make sure that the seminars come off without a hitch and we are completely and utterly dependent upon their labors for our week after week of public programming if I could just ask as I do every week if you've got one of these little devices in your pocket and I know you do if you would please take it out and put it on silent we all know they all have a tendency to go off at the absolute wrong time and so with that I am going to ask Philippa to introduce today's speaker and our subject thank you Eric and good afternoon everybody I'm delighted to introduce Ephraim Kennedy to you he's a professor of history and international relations at our American University as well as the founding director of the anti-racist research and Policy Center at that institution he has had numerous research fellowships and grants he lectures very widely he is the author among other things of a book entitled the black campus movement black students and the racial reconstitution of higher education 1965 to 1972 he has published essays in books and in academic journals and he's the associate editor of black perspectives which is an online platform for scholarship on black life and thought he's currently working on his next book how to be an anti-racist and we will of course be talking with him today or he will be talking with us today about his stamp from the beginning the definitive history of racist ideas in America which was the winner of the United States National Book Award for nonfiction as well as a number of other Awards but before I introduce him totally to you I wanted to tell you that Professor Kenji describes himself as a hardcore humanist who hopes this is his words not only for the day that the world will be ruled by the best of humanity but for the perhaps only somewhat less important day when the New York Knicks win an NBA championship professor Kennedy thank you so much for that introduction Yamma I'm a starving Knicks fan of anybody who's friends with a a New York's Knicks fan you or is in the New York Knicks fans here I think you know a little bit what I'm talking about but it's truly an honor to be here thank you so much for that introduction thank you for this invitation thank you all for for coming to talk about and listen and and and dialogue about this book that I wrote entitled stamp from the beginning and so what I'm gonna do in the time that I have is clearly this this is a long history of racist ideas it literally spans its entire history from 15th century Portugal to the President and so clearly I can't narrate that history and in in the time allotted but what I'd like to do is is share with you some of the overarching framework and frameworks that I use to write this history and and more or less the major of sort of finding so what did I realize from studying upwards of 500 years of racist ideas first and foremost as any interview would imagine in studying this history I quickly realized that no one in American history or even modern history has been willing to identify their ideas as racist and I think we know a little bit about that today right and and and so of course that necessitated a very deeply controversial thing to do from the start which is very simply defining a racist idea drawing that line in the stand between what is the racist idea and what is what I call an anti-racist idea because I as you'll see sort of that is the dialectic racist in anti-racist ideas not necessarily racist and non racist ideas but racist in anti-racist ideas and and I also realized that really every group of people every group of thinkers that I chronicled in this text define their own ideas outside of racism and and whether that slaveholders whether that segregationists whether that's assimilationist whether that is callin colonizers so on and so forth mass incarcerate their ideas have consistently been defined outside of racism and they've stated that their ideas are God's law are Sciences law or common sense or are based on statistical analysis and so I defined a racist idea very simply there's any idea that suggests a racial group is superior or inferior to another racial group in any way so let me repeat that any idea that suggests a racial group is superior or inferior to another racial group in any way and in contrast anti-racist an anti-racist idea is any idea that suggests the racial groups are anybody want to take a guess equal so racist ideas Express racial hierarchy anti-racist ideas express racial equality there's no in-between between equality and hierarchy and so that's what I'm talking about in terms of that's really the dialectic between racist and anti-racist ideas now another key aspect of that definition and I think that's one of the in this aspect is probably what made the book a little bit longer is is what I mean by racial group and so when I say racial group I'm not just referring to let's say black people and white people I'm also referring to black women black women are racial group I'm also referring to the black poor the black poor are a racial group not to be not to be compared with the poor right or the white poor which is another racial group there's a distinction when you say something that the black poor is lazy you're saying something different than when you say the poor are lazy right you're racializing the sort of poor and the same thing for black lesbians and gays the same thing for the racialization of ethnicities and and so as I started unpacking this history I realize that they were there black people and I say black people because this book is really a history of anti black racist ideas that black people are collection of racial groups and and though that collection is differentiated by gender by sexuality by class by ethnicity by nationality by even skin colour and so on and so forth and I say this because each and every one of these racial groups have been targeted with racist ideas that are distinct and so in other words the racist ideas that I Chronicle in the text about black women are distinct from the racist ideas that I Chronicle in the text about black men to give an example or the racist ideas about the black poor are different than the racist ideas about black elites and the way this also works is because you begin to see the ways in which racist ideas have intersected with other forms of bigotry and so intersectional Theory those are you are familiar with black feminists intersectional theory it's critical in understanding the history of racist ideas one of the ways we can understand this is that if you say if you believe that black people are lazy and you also believe that poor people are lazy then when you put that together you're going to believe that black poor people are lazier than white poor people or if you let's say if you believe that real women are weak and you also believe that black women are not really women then which that intersection creates this idea that black women are strong which means they're not really women in contrast white women are weak which is what makes them women and so this is you know these are the types of ideas and intersections that I Chronicle in this text so it's unbelievably difficult to understand the history of racist ideas without understanding the history of other forms of bigotry so if you believe that black people are hyper sexual and you also believe that gays and lesbians are hyper sexual then that intersects to create this idea as theorists have stated that black gays and lesbians are more hyper sexual than white gays and lesbians and so that's just you know did give you a sense that you know I know it's a very simple definition any idea that suggests a racial group is superior or inferior to another racial group in any way but it becomes quite sophisticated when we understand the vast number of racialized groups within the black race let alone other races and so the other aspect of the text is I began to see through studying this history that racist ideas and anti-racist ideas have fundamentally tried to answer a central question a central question that has persisted over the course of American history and that central question is very simple why do racial disparities exist and persist in American society why does racial inequality exist why does black slavery and white freedom exist why does Jim Crow segregation exist why is it that 40% of the incarcerated population in this country right now is black even though black people represent 13% of the national population why do these disparities exist and Americans have long argued over the answer one group of Americans has stated that these inequities exist black people are on a lower end of these inequities because they're inferior another group of Americans have stated that black people are on the lower end of these inequities because of racial discrimination and so that has been the central argument do these disparities exist because of racial hierarchy or because of racial discrimination and Americans have been arguing that over the course of history racist ideas cano ting racial hierarchy anti-racist ideas expressing racial discrimination everybody sort of follow so far so so what becomes even more sophisticated though is that I actually found not one type or I should say not one type of racist idea but actually two types of racist ideas and so really this two-way debate between racist ideas and anti-racist ideas have in fact been a three-way debate between two kinds of racist ideas constantly sort of challenging anti-racist ideas so the way to understand these two kinds of racist ideas is to understand why people are saying black people are inferior so Americans within the sort of community of racist ideas have been debating why black people are inferior one group of Americans have stated that black people are inferior by nature in other words were created unequal that black people are genetically inferior they are permanently inferior another group of Americans have stated that the racial groups are created equal that black people became inferior that my people are inferior not by nature but by nurture that environment has actually led to black inferiority when I say environment I'm talking about everything from what people consider pathological African or even African American culture to the environment of slavery has literally embroided black people so abolitionists made this case that slavery was literally making black people into brutes and that's why it's so horrible it's making them into subhumans and anti-racist were like it's well it's one thing to say that an institution is dehumanizing it's yet another thing to say it has actually dehumanized people and that these actually these people have remained human despite this dehumanizing situation but that idea and this is a more progressive idea that the environment of discrimination has created black inferiority has persisted to this day after slavery ended it was segregation is making black people inferior after segregation at least legally ended it became poverty and incarceration is making black people inferior which is the dominant sort of idea today that discrimination in the environment of discrimination or black people's inferior culture this environment is making black people inferior while segregationists have been like no it's not the environment it's their racial nature and so then of course anti-racist have stated no actually black people are neither inferior by nature nor nurture that black people are not just created equal that black people are equal so the distinction between all racial groups are created equal in all racial groups are equal is a very crucial one that I sort of Chronicle in this text and so really that's been the sort of this sort of three-way debate that I chronicle in Stan from the beginning and I should say one of the other ways we can understand this three-way debate is that really the assimilationist is almost like the moderate for the lack of a sort of better term because one of the things assimilation as you could glean from my sort of description of them as assimilationist have recognized the existence of discrimination so they have simultaneously stated that black inferiority is both the result of discrimination and the behavioral cultural inferiority of black people both and they typically have stated that one has led to the other while segregationists who have made the case of black people of the racial groups being created unequal have stated that no racial discrimination doesn't exist we're in a post-racial Society this idea of a post-racial society is actually quite an old one because really every racist idea has suggested that we every racist idea I should say is like a post-racial idea turning heads away from discrimination and onto the inferiority of of a particular racial group and so a segregationist have stated that no racial discrimination is not partially the cause the total cause of black in theory already is black people is their behavior is their racial nature why anti-racist have stated that no the reason why we have these disparities again is discrimination so really I chronicle this three-way debate over the course of American history and I think one of the more interesting aspects of this history is you'll find that many people who actually respect and I'm sure you respect many American icons many American icons of racial progress have actually fallen into the assimilationist camp I won't sort of name names because I want to encourage you to read the book but that's one of the more interesting aspects of the text and so I reorient some of their ideas as racist ideas as assimilationist ideas so I should also state that sort of that brings me to the principal I think historical finding of the text which I did not expect to find in in in in writing this history I entered into this history of racist ideas expecting that I was going to sort of reinforce the common sort of origin story of racist ideas the popular orange origin story a popular origin story that states that racist ideas have largely came out of ignorance in hate in other words those who historically have been producing racist ideas have produced them because they were ignorant a black black people were they hated black people that was the cradle their ignorance and hate and so then that ignorant and hate led to them producing these racist ideas and then because people had these racist ideas that is why we've been told they instituted racist policies from slavery to mass incarceration so in other words the racist ideas came before the racist policies so that's the anybody sort of heard that before ignorance and hate leading to racist ideas and racist ideas leading to racist policies and that is why historically racial reformers have sought have thought that education and persuasion is the principal tool that we should be utilized to undermine racism in other words if racist ideas are causing the policies and ignorance and hate is causing the racist ideas racial reformers have strategized okay you know what the way we undermine racism when we understand racism as this marriage of racist ideas and racist policies the way we undermine racism is by teaching away ignorance and hate by formulating love armies that conquer this hate and so as a result all of the major sort of reformist racial formants movement education and persuading the masses of Americans has been central to their strategic aims from the abolitionist movement to the civil rights movement to a certain extent to to black lives matter today and so this is of course very critical right when we under when we have a theory on the origins of racist ideas if therefore necessitates how we're going to challenge them and so I thought that that was the case but as a scholar I of course did not take it for granted and I decided very early on to distinguish between the producers of racist ideas and the consumers of racist ideas the producers of racist ideas these the people writing the novels that are being consumed by millions of Americans like Thomas Dixon's sort of reconstruction trilogy that imagine that the Ku Klux Klan saved the white south from the barbarism of black politicians the people writing these novels the people making the films the people giving the political speeches the scholars ascertaining or I should say unveiling scholarship that rules black people inferior the producers of racist ideas that that I wanted to study these producers and and very consciously distinguish them from the consumers and and then in in sort of understanding that I wanted to study these producers I wanted to ask of very central question why was date why were they producing those racist ideas at that time what was the motive was it that they were just ignorant and hateful what was the motive behind the production of their racist idea so to give an example one of the more critical racist ideas in American history was the idea that slavery was a positive good this idea was articulated not far from here by a u.s. senator from South Carolina by the name of John C Calhoun on the floor of the Senate in 1837 and in particular he challenged a Virginia senator who just claimed slavery was a necessary evil so for those of you aren't sort of familiar with slavery history for the early American history or I should say early American history was largely that this concept of slavery as a necessary evil predominated it was largely came out of the ideas of people like Thomas Jefferson and but by by the men - 1830s slaveholders were being faced with a growing abolitionist movement in 1835 the newly formed American anti-slavery society decided that they were going to use some of the new developments in printing technology to print hundreds of thousands of documents showing the brutality of slavery and they started mailing these pamphlets and these posters all over America including into the South in 1835 which of course cause some slaveholders to think they literally were we're at war and but the key aspect of this strategy was to show Americans that slavery was not a necessary evil but it was an unnecessary evil and they largely to a certain extent began to succeed so two years later john c calhoun seeing this resistance to this old pro-slavery theory realized that you know what it no longer is holding the political weight that it used to it no longer is consorted justifying slavery in the way that it used to so instead we need a new theory and that new theory became slavery as a positive good and so he began to make this case and few years later a Harvard psychiatrist reign psychiatrist by the name of Edward Jarvis decided that he was going to study the 1840 census in particular the data on people who were identified as insane it was the first time the census takers actually categorized people by insanity and so we started looking closely at this data correlated it with race and began finding that people who were more likely to be insane black people were more likely to be insane in the north than in the south and then he asked scholars do tried to decide okay what does this mean well for him it meant slavery must be driving black people insane I'm sorry slavery I'm sorry freedom must be driving black people in slain and slavery must be good for black people and so he decided to take this data and his analysis and publish it him and what happened to be only the most famous and influential medical journal in the world the New England Journal of Medicine and he published his data and his findings in this journal as you would imagine especially in in Washington today I'm sure you could figure out what John C Calhoun and others decided to do with that data you see this shows slavery is a positive good and and freedom is driving black people insane and so Edward Jarvis as I'm hopeful most scholars would do to continue to study that data and he began to find some errors he began to see that in some northern towns there were more black insane people than there were black residents and he was like okay clearly there's something wrong here right and as one of the four the founders of the American Statistical Association he decided to get some of his colleagues to lobby Congress to investigate what's going on like these are critical errors particularly in an and a political time in which slaveholders are making the case that we have now statistically proven that slavery is a positive good uh and so to make a long story short the person who ended up overseeing the investigation of the 1840 census just so happened to be John C Calhoun who was the Secretary of State who as you would imagine did a sham investigation and stated that you just don't want to accept the truth that slavery is a positive good now I bring up that story because it causes me as an historian you know and as a scholar to ask a very simple question was John C Calhoun stupid or was he utilizing this study to advance a political objective was he stupid in that he was a slaveholder he was a slave holder in some South Carolina in South Carolina because of the density of black slaves the amount of violence suffered by those black saves was probably the most in the United States at the time so either he just did not see this consistent brutality that maintains slavery or he saw it recognized that it was beneficial to him and realized that he had to continuously find ways to defend it I bring this up because I ultimately through studying this example in many others throughout American history I found that our Comment sort of idea that ignorant sin hate is leading - racist ideas and racist ideas have led to racist policies is not only a historical but it's actually been quite the opposite I found a history of economic political and sus and and cultural self-interest leading to the creation of racist policies and people resisting those policies which then caused those who benefited from those policies to create and produce racist ideas that defended those policies and they mass circulated those ideas in positions of sort of power to do so and Americans mask consumed them and their mass consumption of racist ideas has actually what has led to ignorance and hate that's the sort of story that I Chronicle in stampin beginning racist policies actually leading to racist ideas and not the other way around as as we've been commonly taught and I think if some of you were to sort of think about our current moment I think you could sort of begin to see how that's precisely what has been happening to partly give one of the more obvious examples in the realm of voting as many of you of course know you know after the 2008 election the Republican Party began to realize that the ideology and the demographics of the country was shifting away from them and historically when political parties or political groups have realized that they no longer had the votes to win what they have attempted to do is figure out ways to suppress the votes of their opponents so as many of you know what ultimately led what ultimately I said should say came about that new effort to suppress voters to suppress votes was a whole series of measures most specifically and most popularly the voter ID law this voter ID law one court stated has targeted African American voters with quote surgical precision and but then particularly as a result of resistance and particularly out of a need to justify why they're creating this laws they of course had to create a justification and that justification of course became voter fraud voter corruption and if anybody is familiar with the history of American politics particularly notions of fraud and corruption then you're familiar with the fact that black voters from the beginning were considered fraudulent and corrupt and the idea that black voters and particularly black politicians were fraud and corrupt is actually what led or were justified the deed the destruction of reconstruction governments after the Civil War the violent and nonviolent Deek sort of reap that's a destruction of these sort of interracial governments and so then of course people began to study this stuff like Edward Jarvis did in the 1840s to figure out okay is there voter fraud problem and some reports found that voter fraud is as popular as alien abduction but still those who benefited from this idea of voter fraud continue to push that narrative and if anything they stated that actually three to five million people voted illegally in a 2016 election that voter fraud is so bad we need to create a presidential commission to undermine it and then you had people who consumed these ideas who believed that there was fraud massive amounts of fraud particularly in black voter districts and so then they went and got their guns in a 2016 election and went to precincts in places like Philadelphia to quote counteract voter fraud like this is the sort of what we're sort of living through and then what happened it it benefited that same political party that created these voter ID laws and some have argued that that was what was critical in the election of Donald Trump in states like Wisconsin where Trump won by about 20,000 volts some state that that because of their new voter voter ID laws and other suppression techniques as many as 200,000 voters or votes were suppressed so you know this is something we're sort of still living with and I'm sure everybody can understand the ways in which this operates within the system of mass incarceration but it's a longer sort of story and so that's the sort of finding the overarching finding that I was surprised to find you know and in studying these these producers and in studying their motives that generally speaking they were producing new racist ideas to justify new racist policies or to defend racist policies in their era and and I say this because it's critical in order to understand this species to understand what I'm arguing what I'm arguing is producers and new so the producers of racist ideas we're creating these ideas to justify I'm sorry we're creating these new racist ideas to either defend new racist policies in their era or to defend old racist policies that benefited them and of course you also has sort of recycling and reproducing over the course of history which I also Chronicle as well but the driving force of history and in most sort of areas is newness it's change and this change was largely occurring as a result of self-interest so what does this all sort of mean and I sort of been seeing this continuous effort among very powerful and influential Americans to continuously justify the persisting disparities in the era which were coming out as a result of the persisting or new racist policies in the era has led to has led me to also sort of reconsider how we understand America's racial history in its broadest sense and and in this sort of the racial storyline particularly the storyline of black history that were oftentimes sort of told particularly in months like this one goes a little something like this that that that we we being Americans we being those who are interested in in eliminating racism that we have come a long way but but we have a ways to go or this idea that we of course have taken two steps forward and occasionally we take two steps back and some say we're taking three steps or four steps back right now but but generally this this construct of sort of America's racial history as being this sort of March when we are sort of unpack it we begin to see that it's understood as this sort of singular force this singular force this singular March of America's racial history the singular progressive march that that things may not be quote perfect right now but they're certainly better than they were a generation ago or two generations ago and that's certainly there are times in which we we are stopped or were pushed back but but generally the arc of America's racial history is it is an arc of progression anybody know what I'm talking about and so this theory this historical theory that of course is very popular and was even of course this is the sort of popular theory that that Barack Obama continuously presented in his in his race speeches this theory this historical theory I wanted to investigate it you know is it true is it true particularly as it relates to to racist ideas and I found that in certain ways it's true and in certain ways it's not true what I mean by that is there actually has been a march of racial progress over the course of American history that is undeniable but what has also been happening is there's been a sec March in that second March is racist progress and so in other words I sort of Chronicle this history of racist ideas over time becoming ever more sophisticated to justify the ever more increasing sophistication of racist policies I chronicle this history of anti-racist activists challenging and sometimes undermining or eliminating racist policies and those who benefited from those policies figuring out new and ever more sophisticated ways to hold people back so in other words breaking down barriers and those coming back and renovating them even bigger you know that's the sort of history that I tell this dueling history dueling history of racial progress and racist progress that allows us to sort of begin to understand how you can simultaneously have during the presidency of Barack Obama the first black presidency and black lives matters simultaneously it also gives us a sense to how it is that that that Donald Trump could follow Barack Obama and when we began to understand America's racial history we begin to see that racist progress often follows racial progress and so it actually wasn't surprising to me because for many Americans if if Barack Obama sort of symbolizes racial progress then Donald Trump symbolizes racist progress and it makes sense that Trump would then follow Barack Obama as racist progress as oftentimes followed racial progress and so that you also sort of see that history in an instant from the beginning this sort of progress positive and negative progress happening simultaneously and one of the sort of ways we can understand this is the sort of Civil Rights Act of 1964 a civil rights act which of course was the most critical Porton piece of civil rights legislation in American history a civil rights act that largely particularly in the way in which it began to be understood in the courts deemed legal what became known as intentional discrimination and so those therefore who wanted to continue to discriminate or who benefited from discrimination the way their racism progressed was by figuring out ways to discriminate against people in a way in which it could not be proven that that was your intent and so people of course have talked about this idea of a racism becoming more covert I don't necessarily use terms like covert and overt to understand America's recent racial history because whenever I look at racial disparities I'm seeing racism and that's overt and it's been as overt as ever but one of the ways we can understand it using that type of sort of language is to understand in which the way in which discrimination has become privatized in which discriminators have realized that they can't use racial language in their discriminatory policies that they have to hide that language and then they have to use language that connotes or can target those groups of people like a voter ID law without African Americans sort of in the actual law and so therefore if you have a legal theory that states that racism is only racism if it can be proved as intentional then it creates this this this situation in which those who wanna discriminate can easily discriminate so long as it's not in their policies and you can't find any emails stating that they just intended to discriminate against these people it's actually not that hard or what it does is those who are unconsciously discriminating in other words there are all sorts of racist policies that people support and defend in which they don't realize the ways in which those Paula Caeser discriminating against people it causes them to think okay those policies are not discriminatory because I'm not intending to discriminate against these people and so it this is the sort of situation where therefore living in and that's how you have despite the Civil Rights Act of 64 being passed fifty four years ago racial disparities are as pervasive as ever because racist policies are pervasive as ever finally I wanted to sort of give you a sense in the most simplest way of the function of racist ideas historically and and I think this it becomes critical because I wanted to not only sort of sort of show this history sort of show the impact of racist ideas on American history show the debate between racist idea show the ways in which these racist ideas were coming out of racist policies but I wanted the reader to understand in its most fundamental sense the function of racist what are these racist ideas literally doing and and and and and and it becomes quite simple that racist ideas historically and even today suppress resistance to racial discrimination that's what they do and that's what they've always done and and when you understand it when you understand that racial disparities or any sort of racial disparities whether you want to take the racial disparity of the fact that the black unemployment rate despite it being low as the president continues to sort of announce is twice as high as the white unemployment rate and it has been so for the last 50 years consistently there's only two explanations assimilationists would say a third one but there's only two primary explanation either there's something wrong and inferior about black workers that black workers are twice as likely to be unemployed because they're unqualified because they're lazy because they don't want to work because they tried either hangout on welfare because there's something wrong with black workers and that's why they're twice as likely to be unemployed or job discrimination those are the only two explanations and of course assimilationists will say actually it's both that that yes african-americans have experienced job discrimination and they experienced our discrimination and eventually because of that job discrimination they developed this call so called legacy of defeat in which they stopped trying and stop trying to get a job but it really comes out of discrimination but they are they should be trying harder and so really it's either or both there's something wrong with black workers or job discrimination and so when we think of any disparity any racial disparity those are the only two causes and so if you have consumed and believe racist ideas it causes you to see people as the problem as opposed to policies that's what it causes you to do and then you your solutions become okay we need to either civilize or incarcerate or kill these people as opposed to changing and eliminating and renovating and figuring out new and corrective policies and so as a result it then leads as you see this policy debate because that policy debate is based on an intellectual debate that's underlying it and and so it also then means that if it is in fact the case that the racial groups are in fact equal then what that means is that if racial disparities exist they must be the result of racial discrimination and that the job of the anti-racist is to figure out what racist policy is causing that disparity a policy that society may be conscious of or unconscious of and and I say that because really when we think about then strategies to undermining racism if if racist policies are coming out of self-interest if racist ideas are coming out of racist policies if ignorance and hate is coming out of racist yes then it causes us to readjust how we imagine we can undermine racism in American society it causes us to realize that if we really want to undermine the production of racist ideas it's actually quite it's actually more effective to challenge racist policies to challenge their cradle and therefore it it results in really at the most fundamental level the struggle over race in America has been a struggle over policy and power not ignorant and hate and and so if we therefore if groups of people who are committed to a gala terian policies who believe that the racial groups are equal if they go about changing policy and therefore getting a positions of power to change policy that is essentially historically how progress has came and that's how progress will continue to come thank you [Applause] yes but let me just first say when we get to questions wait for the microphone to reach you please use the microphone so everybody can hear you it's a crowded room and please identify yourself when you speak but first fill up up you've got a question thank you so much professor candy I want to pick up on your conclusion in your book you talk about as you have here about racial discrimination being the result of economic political cultural self-interest and what you are looking for is what you call intelligent self-interest meaning people recognizing that racial discrimination does not serve the country or anybody in it very well and so at the same time you criticize efforts at education now I understand the context that you're saying education was used to say oh look at how black people are being treated and if you only understood it you would not be racist but looking at a policy perspective absent education about what it is that is going on how would you see the changes in policy coming about how would you see people understanding what intelligent self-interest is sure of course she asked a extremely difficult question thank you so much well I think that first and foremost in order as I think people in Washington recognize typically and I say typically because in in in last 12 months they've been major policies that have been enacted that the vast majority of Americans were against but typically when you enact a policy you'd like to enact a policy that Americans realize are beneficial to them and the way you of course go about doing that is to educating them and in showing them that that policy is beneficial to them but really in order to even have the capacity to educate in the context of passing policy you of course have to be in a position of power and you have to be in a position in which you recognize that the policy is actually the driving force whatever use when I bring that up is because some would argue well let's before we can even get in positions in which we can make these dramatic policy changes Americans have to be mass educated away from sort of racist ideas and then therefore goes up against people who are consistently trying to mask educate them towards racist ideas so it becomes this sort of never-ending sort of there's it's very difficult to sort of win that that battle particularly in this environment and so that's why I sort of advocate I think you should I think we should be focused on educating the consumers of racist ideas but I don't advocate the education of the producers of racist ideas I don't advocate the education of people in positions of power particularly those who already know that the ideas that they articulating our defensive ideas that they possibly even know are not even true and so that's really the sort of difference and and and that's what I emphasize very quickly about intelligent self-interest I think at the at the end of the book again not to give it away I try to distinguish between intelligent and unintelligent self-interest in that historically what what racist ideas have done is it has caused large groups of Americans to have unintelligent self-interest in believing that racist policies were beneficial to them and so in other words those those those those southern though I should say those those Americans currently who have been disenfranchised by their own party's voter ID law still believe those ideas are beneficial to them that's under unintelligent self-interest right all those five million impoverished whites who in 1860 were many of whom were believing that slavery was actually good for them or those Americans who are voting for politicians who are going to undercut their own welfare or who are going to undercut money for public universities and shift that away to private prisons or public prisons like all on this basis that those that those sort of prisons will actually make them more safe right and so they actually believe that and and that's why you know I should have show the ways in which really only a very small group of Americans have benefited from racist policies and that the vast majority of Americans simply have not so let me use my co-chair prerogative to get the second question in there's a lot more in this book than you were able to touch upon in the scant 45 minutes that we allotted for your talk and so to get the full sense of the book you have to read it one of the themes that you didn't talk about here but that's in the book has to do with the application of the term racist not to some of the categories that you described here but to various individuals or groups of African Americans who themselves took a critical stance toward people of their own race in a different group so at one point you have Marcus Garvey who makes a brief appearance turning to blistering racist ridicule when he accuses black people of being the most careless and indifferent people in the world there's a political context for that but that's a a blistering racist ridicule that he engages in when black voters later in the book toward the end criticized or looked down upon black non voters they are targeting those non voters with racist ideas or when black rank-and-file activists criticize say I think this is in the 1970s black politicians for not taking stands strong enough to address the NEADS they too were engaged in an a racist critique of black politicians and so the term racism becomes so ever expansive that if it covers a john c calhoun or a donald trump but also black activists criticizing black politicians for not being radical enough is the term as a descriptor that useful or well clearly you you you use the term here but i guess i'm questioning its utility for some groups whose motivations and intentions are very different than either those of the out-and-out racists that you write about or even the assimilationists so i mean that's another difficult question and and i think one of the last points that i made I'll sort of reiterated and that is the function of racist ideas so ultimately I talked about how the function of racist ideas has historically been to suppress resistance to racial discrimination in other words those who have held racist ideas are people who are saying at least as relates to black people that black people are the problem in not discrimination and so when we think about it from that and then think about it from Matt as the core and then think about it out we begin to see that over the course of history that black people to have told black people know you're the problem not racial discrimination and therefore it's resulted in black people therefore not resisting racial discrimination and have focused their reformist efforts on civilizing and even incarcerating black people as the problem and and and so and then we begin to see therefore that racial discrimination persists as a result and and so ultimately I in entering into the book I did not expect to write a history that included black people saying that black people were the problem in our Paul I too believed in this prominent theory that people of color and in this case black people quote cannot be racist but again it an and that theory therefore is based on this idea that black people don't have power and so black people can't be racist and and that theory therefore does not have I think a very sophisticated understanding of power in that there have been quite a few black people who have had power and have utilized that power to undermine black people as opposed to discrimination that even blind people today are refusing to hire black workers because they think black workers are lazy but somehow when that black employer does that that's something different that when a white flow employer does that I see I think I should also say that when I when I defined a racist idea and I think it's critical you know when it comes to our scholarship that we do not necessarily think of the implications of definitions because when we think of the implications of definition I think it's going to change the nature of the definition and so for me I was like okay this is how I'm gonna define it and they're there for whoever comes within this banner of suggesting that there's something wrong and inferior about black people whatever I should say idea comes into that banner that's a racist idea no matter who is expressing it because no matter who is expressing it it's saying that we should be focusing on those people instead of policies and so as a result those policies persist I think it will also be interesting to know that it's probably one of the most harmful racist ideas about black people in the 20th century was produced by a black scholar and I'm referring to this theory that the black family is in ruins that black single headed households are pathological anybody know what I'm talking about that the black family is fraud right and therefore that is the reason why black people commit more crimes because they come from these so-called broken families that's the reason why we should undermine welfare because these women just having babies to get more money on welfare this theory this this idea that the black family is is is fraud was actually produced and popularized by Franklin Frazier who was a Howard sociologist who wrote a book called the Negro family in the United States and Daniel Patrick Moynihan who more or less allowed this theory to become a part of policy through his influential efforts in in the Kennedy ultimately the Johnson administration's and Nixon administration he in his morning ham report in 65 continue cited a Franklin Frazier over and over again to sort of justify his theories and so we you'll see this in Stephanie meaning I oh I didn't realize that that theory which I considered to be a racist theory and when I'm saying that's what you would be saying was actually produced by somebody who happened to be black gentleman in the far back on my right side you hold it microphone is coming and here it is thank you very much I really loved your book and hopefully I'll get an autograph my name is Malala I'm is gonna hear I'm from South Africa and as I read the book I kept wondering you know how how the story might have developed had you taken it you know down that way instead of you know to the Americas and and how the ideas might have stood up or not stood up and and this leads me to a couple of questions one is to what extent are you giving everyday white people a pass when you define racism in terms of policy in other words to what extent is it something that is sort of limited to the people who actually think strategically and purposively about what to do in their self-interest because coming from South Africa I mean racism basically gets to a point where it has an autonomy of its own where people without necessarily rationalizing it as being in the self-interest just act in ways and that's because that's ideas that have been you know ingrained in them without necessarily thinking about whether ice in their economical cultural self-interest and and and finally in South Africa what happened is in addition to the nurture and and the nature and nurture differentiation I wonder if you've thought about the the concept of difference what happened is that when a barricade became kind of like unsustainable the whites began to talk the language of difference no longer that of course in failure it was a subtext but the idea was that don't know we're not against black people he saw that they are different they need to live in their own homelands they need their own spaces and I wonder whether that could fit in your framework but I'd love to talk to you some more sure so answer the last question first so that theory was actually quite prominent particularly in in in in Jim Crow South in which segregationist of course made the case that were separate but equal and and and the reason why we should be separate but equal is because they're fundamentally by nature different or by nature different and so this that you know that Chronicle sort of that theory and I also Chronicle some of the creators of this idea of separate but equal most notably an Atlanta newspaper edited by the name of Henry Grady who in 1880s popularized this theory as he was popularizing this concept of the new South a new South that of course would be beneficial in in civilizing black people away from slavery just as slavery civilized black people away from Africa in terms of the first sort of question again to be quite precise I'm distinguishing between the producers and consumers and so when I'm talking about self-interest I'm talking about and very clear self-interest meaning conscious self-interest I'm talking about the producers of racist ideas racist ideas and then when those people are and then when you distinguish them from the consumers racist ideas have been extremely effective when those who have consumed them do not even have to consciously think about their self-interest in other words it becomes a part of what I call their common sense really the common sense of America is racist ideas and so it's not even a sense of you know this is in my end like this common sense that the reason why all those black people in prison is because black people are more criminal like right the reason why those black neighborhoods are more impoverished it's because black people don't want to save money and they don't want to work that is sort of the common sense and and so it's not necessarily this case that the consumers are acting on self-interest they're acting on these racist ideas that have more or less become their common sense and so what I sort of show or what I want to show the consumers is that what you actually think is your common sense is actually racist ideas and what you actually think is good for you is actually bad for you right and and I think that's what ultimately comes across I think in in reading this text and what has happened to Americans historically when they unpack their own racist ideas raised on the Wilson Center I wanted to ask about media related questions so when we see stories about property damage caused by post Superbowl Philadelphia Eagles fans versus property damaged caused by the aftermath of the death of Freddie gray which happened in my home state of Maryland really the what sort of role do editors or gatekeepers of content not necessarily the direct producers what sort of role do they play in the spread of racist ideas thank you well I think historically I think members of the media have been very critical in that spread and you've had members of the media who like the rest of us were born and raised intellectually in a nation in which they consume racist ideas and racist ideas became more less their common sense and that's how they sort of ascertained and that's how they almost flippantly do what you just described right in terms of when there are these massive amounts of white people who are who are happy or sad or upset about something and and they conduct and may of course damage property well that's out of their anger right versus when when black people do it because they're resisting police brutality it demonstrates that they have no sense and no understanding of property it demonstrates that they don't know how to you know of course those things of course happen but I should say within the media you have people who are reproducing racist ideas and then you are people who are producing and I think it's critical for us to understand the difference between those two two groups of people so this idea of the angry white person who's letting out their anger as people normally do and the rioter that that's a very sort of black rider this is that's a quote old idea that really has been recycled for quite some time and I you know even chronicle the reaction of the even the term riot itself right which of course has a term that largely has been debated in other words I don't describe those things as right I described them as urban rebellions or rebellions which is a different sort of thing Maxine Waters after the after the LA rebellions in early 1990s critiqued media members for calling in a riot and say that these people are clearly rebelling against police brutality so it's more accurate to call it a rebellion and so I bring this up because I think one of the things we begin to see is the way in which language sort of and and the racist ideas that are baked in language in terms that are regularly used is is is something that I think is pervasive I to give you another example after the President of the United States called certain countries curse words and Americans of course were irate in the way he degraded those nations in Africa and in South America well many of those Americans would degrade those nations by calling them developing countries right but the concept that they're developing in other words the assimilationist idea that we can civilize them and we're civilizing them is not considered to be a racist idea in the way that is because and so I think that that that's a sort of another example in which sort of terms that we use every day that I've used we don't understand the sort of racist history behind those terms right up here in the front second row Phillip Brenner I'm proud to say I'm a colleague of yours at American University so I have we can get some sense of what you're talking about in terms of what an anti-racist set of scholarship would be indeed but your last point here was the point you made in your New York Times op-ed piece about developing countries can you give us a brief summary of what this what a set of scholarly tasks would be that an anti-racist centre would undertake anti-racist centre or scholarship well okay soon the anti-racist centre is sure supporting anti-racist scholarship so let's say a few words about that Center for people who don't know okay sure so of course when I saw my colleague here I got all nervous because who knows what he's gonna say to my other colleagues back at AU but so I think first and foremost those who have racist ideas and those who have anti-racist ideas are going to ask different questions right and at the basis of scholarship is the reefs question those who have racist ideas will say what is wrong with these people and it's my job as a scholar to figure out what is wrong with these people those who have anti-racist ideas will be like the racial groups are equal hello and again I should sort of add when I went in it when I say you know and I believe when I say the racial groups are equal I'm not saying that the racial groups are the same I'm not saying that they are not lazy or criminal like or violent black people I'm saying that they're lazy criminal like and violent white people too and and no one has ever proven definitively that there are more of one of the other and statistics like violent crime rates and in black communities which exclude violent crimes like drunk driving or exclude the fact that there's actually a better correlation between unemployment rates and violent crime than between race and violent crime cause us to think that the problem is those people in those neighborhoods as opposed to unemployment rates so anyway um so anti-racist would ask a different question and that different question of course is is is what are the policies what are the programs and practices that are causing these racial inequities and that I think is the sort of guiding research question of the new anti-racist research and policy Center at American University and we're organized around sort of six different areas of research economics economy education justice health in politics and in these six areas we were sort of planning to ultimately sort of bring together four critical sort of professionals who've been involved historically in in racial change in uncovering and challenging and changing racist policies and those critical sort of four groups are scholars who typically have been critical in uncovering discriminatory policies policy experts who've been critical in formulating and thinking through and developing corrective anti-racist policies journalists who of course have been critical in disseminating research in activists or advocates who've been critical in in literally designing campaigns of change that get these policies instituted and so in those six areas were sort of focused on bringing together those four groups of people who each year hopefully when we raise enough money to do so well will essentially have a major sort of research question well in that research question will be geared to a major national international racial inequity that'll be their job and the job of their research teams to first and foremost figure out the policies the racist policies behind that inequity or those inequities to figure out more corrective policies that could actually reduce those inequities - of course disseminate those new policies and research findings and ultimately to design campaigns of change that cut those policies instituted so that's what we're going to be doing at the anti-racist research and policy Center thank you women up here in the front second row again microphone is coming hello I'm Shirley Barnes I was the u.s. Ambassador to Madagascar and I'm from Harlem but I've lived here in Washington for a while my question is a concern about resegregate and the education system and to educate a child takes a long time and what's already happened is that not just in the South but in the North etc there's an obvious resegregate or segregation in education and I just like your comments on what to do because that takes a long time to correct so I think you're absolutely correct and I think studies have shown the ways in which hyper segregation of neighborhoods and schools have to a certain extent in specific cases increased and of course the historical the read the historical reasons behind man of course when when certain communities their public schools were desegregated either those communities relocated to other communities those people relocated the other communities or they created private schools that excluded people of color or poor people so I think in terms of solutions I think to go back to the Brown v Board of Education decision very briefly the brown B Board of Education decision you know as I sort of Chronicle and stand for the beginning most people don't realize that the court actually agreed with the lower court's finding that the schools were equal of being equalized so that wasn't the reason why they ruled segregated schools as being unconstitutional what actually was decisive was the social science research at the time that was making the case that segregation or I should say segregated schools were literally making black children inferior that it was harming a harmful effect on black children and it's it's striking when you read the words of Warren saying that not non segregated schools was not having a bad effect on black and white children but it was having an effect a bad effect on black children and so therefore we need to therefore allow black children to have access to white children so that they can therefore learn the reason why I bring that up is because that has therefore been the basis of how we understand educational reform that the way we reform the schools is by putting black and white bodies together by putting as many black bodies before white bodies as possible now that is coming from a more there's two sides of that one is coming from a more practical standpoint in which not in which the thinker or the reformist thinks that those white bodies of superior but they recognize the ways in which if black children in these majority white schools will have a better access to resources but then you have others who literally think that schools or priming black children by these white kids will actually be better for them right so ultimately I think fundament I think the focus should be on equalizing the resources of schools no matter the racial makeup of those schools as opposed to figuring out ways to desegregate schools which clearly has failed and clearly was as I sort of talked about was based on unbaked in racist ideas and so but it's very difficult for assimilationist in particular to believe that a majority black school this equally resource can be equal in educating its children to a majority white school they think that's impossible and so that's why they don't advocate for that right because and so but that's one of the things that I would advocate for the equalization of resources but then when we talk about the equalization of resources particularly in a society in which parents claim they enjoy a meritocracy but they would like for their children have all sorts of advantages and resists any efforts right and actually creating a meritocracy it becomes very politically fraught we have a hand up over here um thank you and thank you for a very very interesting presentation of the frameworks in which you are working and my own work I look at a kind of parallel story dealing with sexism and sexist ideas and feminist scholarship and feminist ideas and activism to counteract sexism and because I've done this work for I'm a lot older than you 40 50 years I've become quite humble and recognizing the complexity of identifying self-interest what's going to work what are the sources of sexism therefore what to challenge how to challenge over time it's become not only a changing form of activism but very confusing because of that I am really interested in what you had to say about Franklin for the Fraser clearly it was in his self-interest to advance anti-racist policies and thinking and he was an a thinking intellectual activist would you tell us something more about the context in which he was putting forth ideas that you today 70 years later think of as the most important anti race and no the most important racist ideas of the 20th century so he Franklin Fraser studied or I should say received his doctorate reigning at the Chicago School of urban sociology which at the time was sort of headed by arguably the most one of the most critical sort of assimilationist of the earlier 20th century by the name of robert park and so when we think of assimilationist theory robert park is a critical sort of figure in that history in which he created what he called the race relations cycle which ultimately sort of talked about this idea of the quote either immigrants or people of color sort of first is contact and then there's sort of struggle and conflict ultimately accommodation and finally assimilation and and that sort of transition from one to the other he considered progress and so ultimately he encouraged black people to assimilate into white American when I say assimilate into a my time talking socially culturally even phenol typically and so this was who he Franklin Frazier studied under he also he Franklin Frazier like many young scholars and in the 20s and 30s was a very keen was a very keen reader of WB Dubois and WB's voice when he was at Atlanta University in the late 1890s and early 1900s did a series of came known as Atlanta University studies and one of those studies was done on the quote black family and one of his findings was that the black family is pathological because it's being headed by too many women I should say that another example of this sort of interplay or intersection of racist and sexist ideas is of course this theory that female-headed households are pathological when compared to what male headed households right and so that's what he Franklin Frazier believed that's what Dubois believed and so then they looked out at the African American unions that they had more female-headed households than the white community which meant their family or family structure or their family governing unit was inferior to the governing structure and the households in the white community we of course since then people like the hooks and others have have asked very simple questions so you're saying that too bad parent is better than one good parent so so you're saying that actually it's it's there cases in which it's not that are for a child if that hostile abusive physically abusive male is not in the household you know very simple sort of questions that of course weren't being asked you know at that time of course we've also we also know that if you have two parents in the household that it's more likely that you'll have more income and I say more likely because sometimes you have men in the household who are the third child of the working mother I should also mention that if Franklin Fraser was a sociologist operating in the 30s and 40s which assimilationist ideas was dominant during that period a so dominant as I stated that it was critical to the ruling of the brown v board of education decision in 1954 in which scholars I should say sociology were trying to figure out why haven't black people assimilated what is wrong with them in comparison Italians and Irish are the groups of people these people have not assimilated what is going on and assimilating of course was considered the virtue of being an American I have a question back here woman in a gray sweater hi i'm kyla I'm a PhD candidate at GW I'm grappling with this I'm Eric student I'm grappling with the notion of I'm envision this as a very hierarchical while you're describing it as a dialectical relationship between the producer and the consumer I think just in the confines of American thought I'm imagining these producers as wealthy elite the slave owner right that wants to keep the economical economic benefits of slavery and I'm grappling with that in comparison to all the you know in the last 20 years all the work on the grassroots racism and how whites in the suburbs or you know all over the country found it in their interest and kind of created their own identities around racism at the grassroots how do you conceive when you're making of producers what is a relationship between the grassroots who might not who might also be creators of this right and not just consumers how do you see this kind of do you see the production moving almost back and forth sometimes or is it almost always a power dynamic that makes sense of course your student will ask a difficult question right so I think that generally in in in stem from the beginning most of the producers are in fact people who have platforms and and people who are in positions of power and people who have the ability to reach many people with their ideas and but in the context I think of the last 20 years I think I would sort of want to it seems to me that many of these grassroots efforts were largely or some of them were largely derived from an intellectual standpoint by the very effort of places in Washington and other places in which you had these massive and massively power think tanks that were constantly sort of dishing out these ideas particularly to to white Americans and then that was causing then people to have these ideas and organize around them right and then of course when they organized around them and it consumed them they probably changed them to fit their own specific experience to mold it to percent presumably sort of galvanized and organized people in their specific environment but the seed of that idea that I mentioned that of course blossomed presumably in different ways depending on the community I would argue largely came out of those producers and those producers typically were quite elite that now that's not to say that all of the producers of a racist or even anti-racist ideas have been very powerful wealthy elite people there are instances in the text in which people who are not in that category produce racist ideas that go in our terms viral right and so that certainly happens and even of course happens today more likely because of the power of social media we could go on I think for many hours more but it's now unfortunately time to draw this to a close I want to invite you all to a light reception outside this room remind you that on February 12th next week Andrew demchoke is speaking on a slightly different subject demolition on karl marx square cultural barbarism and the people's state in 1968 thank you to our participants and thank you to Professor Ken Dee [Applause] you you

Channel: American Historical Association

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Keywords: Ibram x. kendi, white power, black power, black panther, dreadlocks, black man, smart black people, intelligent black people, professor of history, howard university, anti-black, racist, bigot, American University, civil rights, blackish, Black Campus movement, new york times best seller

Id: OYGfLM0QQL4

Length: 88min 57sec (5337 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 09 2018