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Section 1 of Stamped includes the book’s first four chapters, which chronicle the origins of anti-Black racism from 15th-century Portugal to 18th-century America. The first chapter, titled “The Story of the World’s First Racist,” singles out the Portuguese writer Gomes Eanes de Zurara as the father of racism. Although references to slavery and racialized differences can be found in ancient texts like the Bible and classical Greek philosophy, Stamped points to Zurara’s Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea as the first work to articulate the principles that still inform anti-Black racism today. According to Reynolds, Zurara’s book was propaganda used to justify the enslavement of Africans by claiming that slavery was an attempt to convert them to Christianity and save their souls. Other theories also emerged to justify enslavement. The “climate theory,” which dates to the Greek philosopher Aristotle in the fourth century BCE, held that heat weakened African people and made them inferior. The “curse theory,” based on a dubious interpretation of the Book of Genesis, maintained that God had cursed Ham, one of Noah’s sons, thereby justifying the enslavement of all Ham’s descendants (Black people).
Read more about the “remix” style in which Stamped is written.
Chapters 2–4 shift to the North American English colonies, where Puritan theology and pure greed shaped racist attitudes and prejudices. Importantly, Stamped insists, anti-Black racism shaped colonies of the North and the South, and it also influenced colonists’ attitudes toward Native Americans. In colonial Massachusetts, Puritan minister and intellectual Cotton Mather promoted religious teachings that demonized everything that was black in color, including Black people. According to Reynolds, Mather’s religious writings were self-serving in that they aimed to justify the privilege enjoyed by powerful white settlers (like himself) at the expense of Native Americans and Black people. Meanwhile, white settlers in the South accumulated great wealth by forcing enslaved Africans to farm tobacco, a lucrative export. They came up with creative arguments to justify slavery, many of them rooted in European theories that assumed Africans were innately inferior to Europeans. One such theory was polygenesis, the notion that some people (notably Black people) were not descended from Adam, the first human created by God according to the biblical book of Genesis. This argument was used to justify the mistreatment of Black people based on the lie that they were something less than human.
Read about Main Idea #1 from the book: American racism predates the founding of the United States.
