Josh Brown’s Reviews > Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America > Status Update

“Wherever there are more arrests, people perceive more crime, which justifies more police, and more arrests, and supposedly more crime... [this] fixed the image in people’s minds of the dangerous Black inter-city neighborhood as well as the contrasting image in people’s minds of the safe White suburban neighborhood... ‘dangerous Black neighborhood’ conception is based on racist ideas, not reality.”

“There has always been a razor-thin line between the racist portrayer of Black negativity and the antiracist portrayed of imperfect Black humanity. When consumers have looked upon stereotypical Black portrayals as representative of Black behavior, instead of representative of those individual characters, then the generalizing consumers has been the racist problem, not the racist or antiracist portrayer.”

“”’The police are the armed guardians of the social order. The blacks are the chief domestic victims of the social order,’ Cleaver explained., ‘A conflict of interests exists, therefore, between the blacks and the police.’”

“...northern and southern racists could only envision White or Black supremacy. And the twenty urban rebellions they ensued in the summer of 1966 only confirmed for many racists that Black Power meant Blacks violently establishing Black supremacy and slaughtering White folks.”

“... 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... and figured that since Blacks were still losing the race, the racial disparities and their continued losses must be their fault.”

“Even if these racial reformers managed to one day replace all ‘negative’ portrayals with ‘positive’ portrayals in the mainstream media, then, like addicts, racists would then turn to other suppliers.”

“While ‘negative’ portrayals is Black people often reinforced racist ideas, ‘positive’ portrayals did not necessarily weaken racist ideas. The ‘positive’ portrayals could be dismissed as extraordinary Negroes, and the ‘negative’ portrayals of Black people could be generalized as typical.”

“Separatist organizing can be racist (and when it is, it turns into segregation), if the emphasis is on excluding inferior peoples. Interracial organizing can be racist (and when it is, if turns into assimilation), if the emphasis is on elevating inferior Blacks by putting them under the auspices of superior Whites.”

“... CPUSA officials would... raise capitalist exploration over racial discrimination, instead of leveling and challenging them both at once... The Communist theorized that if they killed capitalism, racism would die, too—not knowing that capitalism and racism had both emerged during the same long fifteenth century, and that since then, they had been mutually fortifying each other while developing separately.”

“In 1916, Stanford eugenicist[s] ‘perfected’ the IQ test based on the dubious theory that a standardized test could actually quantify and objectively measure something as intricate and subject and varied as intelligence across different experiential groups... Standardized tests became the newest ‘objective’ method of proving Black intellectual inferiority.”