Kendi states in the book’s opening that one of his major finds in the research that produced Stamped From the Beginning was the somewhat unexpected pattern of the production of racist ideas in American history. Rather than spawning from ignorance and inadvertently influencing politicians, powerful people intentionally circulated racist ideas to justify racist policies that safeguarded white privileges. The dissemination of those justifications bred ignorance in the wake of undemocratic governance.

The earliest examples of this pattern came in the era of slavery, when enslavers invented and defended hierarchies of human beings that led to natural superiority and subservience. Men like Cotton Mather figured out ways to make these systems fair and legitimate in the eyes of the Church. Thomas Jefferson, one of the most powerful and influential figures in the early period of the American Republic, denounced slavery as an immoral system but allowed it to prop up the economy throughout his entire life and political career, perpetuating ideas about Black unfitness for full freedom and equality.

After the Civil War officially granted freedom to all those formerly held in bondage, southern white community leaders aimed to recreate slavery in whatever ways possible. Black codes and loopholes in voting laws allowed white Americans to control the democratic process and to exclude and terrorize their Black neighbors.