Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

Reynolds moves on to the Age of Enlightenment in the mid-1700s. This movement was largely intellectual, stressing new modes of modern thinking emblemized by men like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. According to Reynolds, the public faces of the movement were “[t]hinkers. Philosophers. And…racists” (42).

The main case study in the chapter is Thomas Jefferson. Reynolds writes that he “might’ve been the world’s first White person to say, ‘I have Black friends’” (42), because he maintained personal relationships with Black people he probably considered friends while failing to rectify his own serious racist actions, like enslaving laborers on his Virginia plantation.

Jefferson and his peers thought frequently and critically about race. Amid steadfast assumptions about Black inferiority, academics studied “exceptional” Black people like Phillis Wheatley, who entered a white family as a captive but learned to read Greek, Latin, and English and became a rather prolific though unpublished poet. While racism and misogyny blocked her from publishing, she shattered ideas about Black mental unfitness for intellectual pursuits. This realization bred assimilationist racist ideas based on the premise that “Black people weren’t born savages but instead were made savages by slavery” (46). Popularized by the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, this idea cast slavery as a damaging, dehumanizing institution.