‘Stamped from the Beginning’ illustrates the ‘algorithm’ of racism in America

About 10 years ago, as the nation was coming to grips with the high-profile killings of a number of young Black people — from Trayvon Martin to Sandra Bland — Ibram X. Kendi wrote the book, “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.”

Roughly three years ago, as the nation was coming to grips with the high-profile killings of a number of young Black people, artist and historian Joel Christian Gill began working on a graphic adaptation of that history. 

Joel Christian Gill, artist and chair of the MFA in Visual Narrative at Boston University, joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to discuss his adaptation, which is out now. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Arun Rath: We last talked 10 years ago about another wonderful book, “Strange Fruit: Uncelebrated Narratives from Black History,” which introduced me to so many great stories.

Joel Christian Gill: I can’t believe it’s been 10 years.

Rath: Yeah. Do you think — I wanted to ask you, actually: Are you responsible for the Bass Reeves phenomenon? Because, since you wrote that, isn’t that when, you know —

Gill: I am not salty about that at all. Probably. I mean, nobody had talked about Bass before I’d written a book about him — and then suddenly, he’s on TV, he’s all these other places. Nobody optioned my book, so I can take some solace in that I put it out there into the world, and people started talking about it.

Rath: You know, in the introduction, I talked about how you and Ibram X. Kendi were coming to the work at different times, but also in times when history seemed to be repeating itself in ways. The book talks about how racism and anti-racism really work in cycles throughout American history. Could you describe that in broad strokes?

Gill: When you look at how the history of American racism — specifically, anti-Black racism — has been, it’s always been this push and pull. What we’ve been sold in the way in which we’ve taught history — because history is taught as a fanfiction of what America really is, not an actual, real history of it — people want to talk about it in glowing terms.

But in reality, the truth is actually much more interesting and much more complicated. At every point, when we’re talking about some progressive step that we take — in terms of dismantling systemic racism, or racial apartheid, or any of the things that we’ve had in America since its inception — there’s always been a backlash by people who are a combination of people who are in power, and people who cling to the idea of whiteness as the only thing that they have.

When we have emancipation, we have 100 years of Jim Crow. When we get rid of 100 years of Jim Crow, we get mass incarceration. We have this systemic racism, and — what most people don’t understand [about racism is] it’s kind of like an algorithm, right? We’re dealing with algorithms now. You don’t ever have to tweak the algorithm if you set it running. You never have to, and if you want it to continue to work, you just leave it alone.

Racism has been like that in America. It was put in place by a long string of people over the course of hundreds of years, and all people now have to do is pretend like it’s not happening and ignore it. So when you take that idea, you really get a sense that racism, really, it’s a cancer — but it’s really like this thing that you never have to tweak. No one has to go in and tweak that.

We can tweak it by actually making the changes. But that’s the thing that people fight: It’s making those changes because they’re so embedded in the system that it would take an uprooting of massive scales in order to change that.

Rath: You talk about the algorithm, and that’s sort of a great setup for the part of the book that I want to talk about because we have to limit it since it’s all of American history, right?

But since we’re here at GBH in Boston — very close to Harvard — the part that was so fascinating in that regard was right at the beginning: Cotton Mather and the founding of Harvard. There’s a lot that I didn’t know about how these specifically, explicitly racist ideas were part of that formula.

Gill: Yeah. What’s interesting about how racist ideas permeate — so I always think about it as the “they say” of the time, right? You ever hear somebody say, “Well, you know, they say…” Nobody really asks who “they” are. And so those things, racist ideas about Black people — how Black people were brutish, and how Black people were either natured or nurtured, or a different atom, or anything — were embedded in the foundation of a lot of our Ivy League schools because those ideas were permeating at the time. “Everybody was saying this,” and nobody’s going to be outdone.

There’s a page in the book where you see me showing the founders of all these institutions dumping garbage into the institutions at their core. Because those racist ideas get embedded, and we don’t challenge them, right? It’s the algorithm working. As long as we don’t tweak them, they just stay the same.

Rath: What really popped out for me while reading it was, you know, it’s not like you’re beating up on the Western canon or Greek and Roman civilizations. As you point all the way through, there are plenty of people with very anti-racist ideas going back to — you know, Aristotle was OK with slavery, [but] there were a lot of Greeks who weren’t.

Gill: Yeah. I think that’s one of the things that — when we talk about exploring history and not judging people through a modern context — is that at every point in the history of humanity, there have always been people who had loud voices, just not as paid attention to. There were people challenging the ideas, these racist ideas, at their inception: from theologians saying, “God made everybody in the same place,” to people who were basically utilitarian in their ideas about how we should treat everybody a specific way.

But those voices were drowned out. And at every turn, it’s about power and money. I’m trying to think of another word [instead of money], but I mean, really — it’s about power and money.

Rath: You mentioned theologians and theology. We talked about the intellectual side of things, but on the religious side as well — going back to Cotton Mather — there’s the selectiveness in terms of finding bits of Christianity that would justify slavery.

Gill: I mean, and we’re still doing that now, right? We’re still talking about the Ten Commandments, and nobody talks about the Beatitudes, right?

That’s the thing: I think the theologians at the time — Cotton Mather was like, I would say he was the Jerry Falwell of the time. He was basically a public intellectual, so people paid attention to him. For him, it was about justifying the system that he didn’t want to break. It’s not breaking the algorithm, right? You know the algorithm is there, so how do I do this without tweaking the algorithm?

This is when people say, you know, “Don’t protest this way,” or “Don’t give money to these people,” or “Let’s get rid of all these things.” It’s those people who are invested in the algorithm [that] don’t want to break it, and Cotton Mather was no different.

You know, he wrote that essay, “The Negro Christianized,” which was to say: you can save a Black person for the afterlife; just ignore who they are now, right? They’re better off in America than they are in the wilds of Africa.

Rath: That doesn’t seem very Christian.

Gill: I mean, you know, Gandhi said that “Christians are so unlike their Christ.”

Rath: This is so deeply fascinating and [has] so much history that I thought I knew, but didn’t actually from reading this, so thank you. And I’ve got to tell people: We covered like, maybe 3% of the book.

Gill: We didn’t even talk about the jokes! Most people want to talk about the jokes that are in the book.

Rath: Oh, yeah. We were very serious, but it’s really funny — I mean, from the beginning, which starts off with a scene from a TV show. It’s sharply hilarious the whole way through.