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Section 2 of Stamped, which includes chapters 5–10, focuses on the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries that celebrated human reason, liberty, and progress but paradoxically also solidified racial hierarchy. In North America, with its increasing population of enslaved persons, Enlightenment values produced paradoxes and contradictions that were best personified in the person of Thomas Jefferson, whom Reynolds dubs “the Great Contradictor.” On the one hand, Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed humanity’s natural right to liberty; on the other, he enslaved many people, opted not to free them, and even fathered children with one of his slaves. Although he was horrified by slavery as a young man, Jefferson came to value slavery more as he grew older and realized that his household’s fortunes depended on free labor. Reynolds mocks Jefferson’s apparent belief that the people enslaved on his plantation were like family, calling him the first white person to fall back on the defense that he has “Black friends.”
Chapter 5 introduces a key distinction for the book: the difference between antiracist and assimilationist ideas. Reynolds uses the example of the early American physician Benjamin Rush, an opponent of slavery. Rush conceded that enslaved Black people might appear savage and frightening to white people, but he argued that slavery was to blame for this apparent savagery. If Black people were freed and educated, their savagery would disappear because it was learned, not innate. Here Reynolds pauses to stress that Rush’s suggestion that people of color should change in order to be accepted is an assimilationist view, not an antiracist one. Positions that devalue basic and important differences between people are repressive, not liberatory. This is one of the most important arguments in Stamped, as Reynolds explains to readers that they must learn to be themselves—and to be proud of who they are. Chapter 9 ends, for example, by noting that the “cornerstone” of assimilationist thought is the idea that Black people should make themselves “small” or “quiet” or “unthreatening” to protect the comfort of white people.
