Does Racism Have a Birthday?

Where did racism come from—and can we name the moment it began? In this episode of American Socrates, we explore Ibram X. Kendi’s powerful argument that racism isn’t rooted in ignorance or fear, but in self-interest. According to Kendi, racist ideas were invented to justify exploitation—especially the Atlantic slave trade—and only later dressed up as bad science and false moral claims.

We trace the origins of anti-Black racism through Kendi’s historical lens, asking how economic power created the need for a racial hierarchy—and why that matters today. If racism was invented to serve a purpose, then fighting it means more than changing minds—it means changing systems.

This episode challenges the common belief that ignorance leads to racism, and invites you to rethink what you thought you knew about prejudice, profit, and power.

Transcript

This question might sound a little strange at first, but does racism have a birthday?? A moment when it came into the world? Or has it always been with us? Would the ancient Greeks have understood the difference between white people and black people, with the Romans? Because if racism, or if it's just race, has a birthday, it means that this isn't natural. It wasn't always with us. It was invented at some point, by someone, for some reason, and no less importantly, if it was born, it can also die. If there was a point in our history where no one would have understood race, then there could be a time in our future where the same thing is also true. Most people think of race as biological and so is ancient, but if it came about historically, at some point, then we should know what it is, we want to know who invented it, when, and most importantly, why. We're going to trace the invention of race today, not in biology, but in economics, not as a description of people, but as a kind of whitewashing for enslavement. And we're going to build our story brick by brick, with the help of a historian and a philosopher of race named Ibram X. Kendi. This isn't going to be a TED talk about bias or how to be a better person. This is going to be about power, how it's built, how it's hidden, and how it's justified. Because if racism has a birthday, then it's not immortal. It's not inevitable. It's just a bad idea that somehow got written into law, and maybe it's time we rewrote it for the future. So let's start with justifying the idea that racism has a birthday. We should note, in case it wasn't clear already, that if racism has a birthday, then so does race, the concept of race. And I don't mean the color of your skin here. I mean race as a category for human beings. The idea that humanity can be broken up into groups like black, white, Asian, and Latino, each with its own nature, character, and rank. The easiest argument for this is that the Romans would not have recognized any of those terms. They enslaved people. Sure. But that was based on war, on conquest, and on class. They didn't believe that you were inferior because of skin tone or even necessarily where you came from. In fact, if they did, it was because you were white, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed barbarians of Gaul. They believed that you were a loser because their armies beat yours. And so you owed them your life, and that life debt was to be repaid through slavery. They had their own way of categorizing people. It was a two-tier system: patricians and plebeians. And that system would befuddle most of us today. If you were in a classroom and I were to say to you, all of the patricians, go and stand over here against this wall, and all the plebs go stand over there against that wall. You probably wouldn't know which wall you were supposed to go to. But if I said, Hey, all of the black people should go stand by the back wall, all of the white people come up front here. I want all the yellow people to go to my left and the red people to go to my right, you probably know which wall was yours, wouldn't you? My point here is twofold. One, that the concept of race came about sometime after the Romans, and that just because you have a sense of your own race, it doesn't mean that you understand the concept really at all. If you don't really know on what grounds you're being divided up, you can't really understand it. So, before we move on, you should know that you're all playing pleians. Patricians were the people who could trace their lineage back to one of the patriarchal founders of the Roman Republic. If you can't do that, then you're a pleb. So where does race begin then? According to Kendi, we can trace it back to a man named Prince Henry the Navigator. He was the younger brother of the king of Portugal in the mid-400s. He was nicknamed the Navigator centuries after his death because he was one of the men who sponsored a bunch of voyages that would ultimately discover the trade war winds and many of the different trade routes that Portugal would take to have trade dominance around that time. These voyages developed the tools that were necessary to do important things like navigating south of the equator, where all of the star charts flip over, allowing for the exploration of Africa, especially the west coast of Africa, and fostering what would become to be known as the Age of Exploration in Europe. Now, this guy isn't some kind of cartoon villain. He was as much a businessman as he was an explorer. He was a power player in his society, and he wanted to corner the slave trade, as well as other goods coming out of Africa and out of the Middle East from distant places like India and China. To do this, he would have to cut out the Arab middlemen who dominated the Mediterranean Sea at this time. Henry has two problems to solve if he really wants to be become the main slave supplier to Europe. The first is that the Arabs dominated the slave trade, like I said. The Arabs controlled the Mediterranean as far as naval power was went. They engaged in regular piracy and privateering. They would happily sell everyone that they captured into bondage, and that included Africans, but it also would include Europeans and other Arabs. They didn't really care. They were equal opportunity slavers, you could say. The second problem that Henry faced was that the Catholic Church, which at the time was the only Christian church in Europe, condemned slavery as a terrible sin. They were taking their cues here, both from scripture and from late Roman philosophy, and the church saw slavery as coming between men and God. And that was a role laid out exclusively for the clergy of the church, not for the laity or even the aristocracy. So even monarchs were seen as doing something wrong or doing something bad if they owned slaves. They were coming between the slave and God. And the only person who was supposed to be able to do that was the church. So at the time, most of the slaves, and this was where, in fact, the word comes from, were actually Eastern Europeans, the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe. Through the church's influence, all of the monarchs of Europe were forced to give up their slaves. It was a sin, and so none of them could do it anymore. So what is Henry going to do about this? Well, he starts by capturing West Africans from along the coast, not because they were black. That's not something that existed yet. There was no idea of blackness, but they were available and profitable. You see, at the time, only Portugal had the technology to sail to this part of Africa from Europe. and do so reliably. And so they were able to set up little trade colonies there that allowed them to exploit the natural resources of the lands. And the chief natural resources that they were finding in Africa were its people. Henry just did this. I mean, there is something to say about blacks skinned people here. Henry did find that they would be easier to distinguish from white people. And so if only black Africans were slaves, then you could say, all right, if we see a black person walking around, we know they should have to belong to somebody. But Henry just did this. He didn't think about it. It wasn't something he critically analyzed. He just saw these people as a resource, and he took advantage of it. It was up to his biographer, Gomez de Zerara, to explain why this was actually happening and why this was good. Zarara takes dozens of different African peoples in his narrative, people with different languages, people who had different religions, people who had different cultures, different skin tones, even, and lumped them all together. He paints them then as one singular people. And then he claims that they're less than human, less than Europeans. They're less civilized. They're less moral. They're just less. If that sounds familiar, this is the first breath of the idea of race, even though that's not a word that Zarara is going to use. Race here is not a description of people. It's an excuse, an excuse to enslave. to exploit people, to brutalize them without any kind of shame of sin. It's a way of moralizing this so that the church won't say you're doing something wrong. It's wrong to come between men and God, but it's not wrong to come between these people who are somehow less than men. So these people are being classified, not by their biology, or even by their skin tone or by their cultures, but simply by how exploitable they are. To be black is to be enslavable. That's it. There are many things that you can do to a black man. You can deny him rights. You can break up his family. You can beat him in the street. You can stand on his neck until he suffocates. You can exploit his labor. But if you did any of those things to a white man, it would be a scandal. That's what race is. It's, yes, you're expected to manipulate, to exploit, and to hurt these people. It's okay to do it to them. It's not okay to do it to white people. We understand. That's a sin. But race allows us to say these are different things, that it's okay to do it to these people. And that's why race was invented. Race exists to make that cruelty seem normal, even just or deserved. From here, this idea is going to spread across Europe over the centuries. By the 1700s, we have the Swedish biologist, named Carl Linnaeus, who many of you might know, oh, as the guy who gave us the taxonomic system for hierarchically ordering all life. If you've ever heard humans or homo sapiens, that's his system for naming the different species. He's going to give race a scientific makeover. He divides humanity into four primary races, which are conveniently color-coded. White, yellow, red, and black. And surprise, surprise. White Europeans like himself, he places at the top of this hierarchy. He even adds personality traits that he believes these races are supposed to possess. Whites, he believes, are rational and governed by laws and reason. Yellow skinned people, he believes to be haughty and greedy. Redskinned people are stubborn and hotheaded. Black people, he believes, are crafty and careless. It's junk science, but it sticks because it tells powerful people exactly what they really want to hear. You're not just conquering, enslaving, and exploiting people. You're actually doing them a favor. You're civilizing them. You're taking them out of their mud huts. You're helping them. Or at least you're treating them the way that nature intended them to be treated. That's the real function of racism here. It isn't a neutral way to just simply describe different people and the way they do different things. It gives people the moral license to treat certain groups worse or less than, and still go to sleep at night thinking that they're the superior people. They're good. They're civilized. They're morally righteous. Let me say this another way. Race is the story we invented to make injustice feel fair. It's what lets an officer shoot an unarmed black kid and get told, Hey, man, you did what you had to do. But if he killed an unarmed little white kid, there would be an inquiry, there would be lawsuits. He would face a trial, and he'd probably end up in prison. And it all starts with that first moment, that first birthday, when race was called into existence not to describe skin, but to justify cruelty. So when we say racism is a system, we're not talking about feelings. We're talking about a machine built on purpose and greased with lies. And if we want to understand anti-racism, then we have to understand the engine that it's up against. There's a lot more great history in Kindy's books. But the only other point I really want to make here is to take a second to talk about Madison Grant. You've probably never heard of him, but he was a leading anthropologist in the U.S. in the early 1900s. And his theory was entitled scientific racism. It was meant to prove the superiority of not just whites, but of the Nordic race in particular. In a nutshell, his theory said that the great race, the blue-eyed, blonde-haired Nordic peoples, built civilization and that without them, there would be no commerce, no exploration, no technology, no science, no philosophy. As they end up mixing with these lesser races, they begin to die off. And with them, we'll go to civilization too. So in order to protect civilization, in order to protect our nation, our country, we have to keep our blood pure; lesser races then should be rounded up in his opinion. They should be sterilized, and then he wanted to leave them to die and specially built ghettos where they could live happy little lives until their entire people just disappeared, because none of them could have kids anymore. If this sounds at all familiar, it's probably because Grant had a big fan in Adolf Hitler. In fact, Hitler wrote fawning letters to Madison Grant, calling Grant's book, entitled The Passing of the Great Race, His Bible. That's right, folks. The Holocaust and Nazi Germany had its roots in American racist ideology. Those were American ideas being put into practice in German hands. And this idea of grants is still here today, replacement theory, where whites are becoming a minority, and that's cause for concern, has its roots right there in Grant's work. Here's the thing people get wrong about racism, and I mean a lot of people from both sides of the political spectrum. They think racism is about intentions, but racism isn't about what's in your heart. It's about what's in place. That's the idea behind Kenti's argument. He says racism isn't just what people believe. It's about the policies and the institutions that turn those beliefs, those ideas into real-world inequality. Let me go to you straight from Kendi, who writes, racism is a set of policies backed by ideas that produce and maintain racial inequity. And of other words, it's not just the slur or the stereotype. It's the law. It's the practice, it's the rule book, the system that quietly moves some people forward and holds other people back. Here's a basic example of what he's pointing out. The GI Bill after World War II. And the popular understanding, the bill was colorblind. It said if you served during World War II, you got money for college or for a home loan. But in practice, local banks and white run agencies were allowed to deny black veterans access. So even though technically, they were entitled to this money, they couldn't actually get it. White vets were able to come home and to go to college for free, to buy houses for themselves, using this money, but that was left out of reach for black veterans. They came home and they got nothing. Was that bill intended to be racist? Probably not, but pressure from Southern senators kept discriminatory practices legal, and those practices could then be used to deny the help the GI bill was intended to give to veterans. Did the GI bill produce racial inequity? Yes, yes, it did. And that's the point. That's the racist policy that we need to look at here. The policy creates racial inequity, whether it means to or not, it's racist. The same could be said with early laws, like land laws in the colonies. Two guys are both coming over to the American colonies as indentured servants, one of them's white, one of them's black. At the end of their tenure as an indentured servants, let's say 15 years or something like that, the white guy has to, by law, receive 50 acres of land. But the black guy does not. When he leaves, he leaves with a shirt on his back and nothing else. It's not because he worked any less or did anything less. It's not because he was somehow less human, but because the race had already been invented and would decide who deserved payments for what kinds of services and who got. And if three generations on, the grandchildren of these guys, the guy who got the land and the guy who got the free college, are ultimately doing better than the grandkids of those who didn't. We tend to chalk it up to things like biology and race when really it was just policy all along. These aren't side issues. They're blueprints for the world that we live in. And you can see the same thing today, predatory loans that target specifically black communities, School funding by property taxes, meaning that rich, generally white neighborhoods have all the best teachers, the best buildings, the best equipment, the opportunities. I mean, there's a school district near me where they have rowing machines where you actually get in a little boat in a pool, and there's like, oh, two tanks full of water and you row in the water at like a public high school. Other public high schools in the black areas can't afford books or air conditioners. You know, we also see like hiring algorithms that sort out resumes based on things like names and zip codes more than any other qualification. Still, people will say things, well, that's not racism. Nobody meant to discriminate here. But that's what Kindy's trying to challenge. This is all true, then you can be racist just by existing in a racist society that's designed to benefit your race at the expense of others. You have to do something about that. You can't just sit back and passively enjoy and say, I'm not racist. The government of the people, by the people, and for the people, does imply that whatever the government policy is, it's people are ultimately responsible for making sure that it's fair and just. And if it isn't, well, then it's those people's fault. It's mine, it's yours, it's everyone's. So racism is the structure that decides who gets jobs, who gets houses, who gets their necks stomped on by cops. And if it's okay for cops to treat you that way. And if that's what racism really is, then beating it takes more than being polite, takes more than simple policy. It takes accountability. It takes people, like you and me, willing to face what's real and not just what feels comfortable or what is just easy for us. Okay, we've talked about where race comes from and how racism isn't just personal bias here. But what he's trying to say is that there's no such thing as not racist, that that's just a mask for racism. You're either upholding this system or you're actively working against it. And so there's no neutral place. There's no neutral ground. I've made this argument before when I was talking about Hannah Arendt, but it works the same here with race. In politics, including political identity, everyone is simply on the soccer field. Just like in soccer, you can't be on the field and do anything that doesn't either help or hurt one side or the other. The claim of not racist is just a mask for racism. Now, maybe that sounds a bit harsh. Maybe you're thinking, but I don't hate anybody. I try to treat everybody fairly. I'm color blind. I didn't build this system. I'm just trying to survive in it, man. And look, I hear that too. I really do. But systems don't really care what's in your heart. They don't really care what your intentions are. They care about what you're doing, whether you're passively supporting them or whether you're actively harming them. What you end up staying silent about, what you just simply let happen, actively helps the system. It's like being on a soccer team and sitting down in the middle of the field. You just help the other side. It's an action, too. So let's say your job has 200 employees and 20 managers. Let's say 100 employees are black and none of the managers are. You're not making the decision to hire, but you're also not speaking up. You're also not questioning the decision of why they're hiring white guys who are much farther back in line over this black guy who should be having the promotion by now. You don't say questions like, why don't we have a black manager? Instead, you might say something like, That's not my business. That's what Kenny's talking about here. He's not saying you're a white supremacist out there burning crosses on some poor family's front lawn. He's saying you're helping the system by doing what it was built for you to do. Nothing. You're doing nothing. By not speaking, by not questioning, by not even thinking about it. So if a policy creates racial inequity and you defend that policy or you defend the people who benefit from it, your position isn't neutral. It's protecting inequality. It's like watching a foot race where one runner starts 50 yards behind and saying, Well, I didn't start him back there, so it's not my fault he's losing. Maybe it's just he's not as good of a runner or didn't try as hard or something like that. I'm just trying to enjoy the race. That's not fairness. It's denial. You should be outraged. You should imagine yourself as the kind of person being treated that way and then fight for them as if it was you. Mostly because in some way, you probably are them. And wouldn't you want them to fight for you as well? At this point, a fair question to ask might be, okay, if racism isn't just about hate and not racism isn't enough, then what exactly does count as racism and what counts as anti-racist? Kindy says, racist policies are any laws, rules, or practices that lead to racial enmity. No matter what the intention behind them was originally built. Anti-racist policies are those that work to reduce that inequity. Racist ideas are beliefs that one group is now naturally better, smarter, or more deserving than another. And so anti-racist ideas say that all racial groups are essentially equal, even when they're different, even when we're in different cultures, having different backgrounds or different experiences. And these are going to work together, racist policies and racist ideas, anti-racist policies, anti-racist ideas. Racist policies promote the inequities that give people racist ideas that allow them to enforce and perpetuate those policies. It's kind of a big, nasty circle here. The upside, then, is that anywhere you want to attack it, whether you're attacking individual beliefs and ideas or whether you're attacking broad systemic policies, you are doing harm to the whole thing. Less racist people will result in less racist policies, and less racist policies will be the result of less racist people. Real anti-racism needs to think differently about this issue. Let me try to give you an example here. Imagine an elite medical school that only admits 100 students a year. They base their decisions on standardized test scores and on grades. The usual stuff colleges use, and that causes them to exclude almost anyone who isn't white and upper-class. Now, let's say they reserve 16 seats for underrepresented minorities. Immediately, someone's going to sue, saying this is unfair, that their spot was taken away and given to a less qualified black or Latino student. Well, it sounds like they've got a solid argument there, until you ask, wait, who decided what qualified really means here in the first place? Why were standardized tests used as the gold standard? Who scores better on them? And was that designed on purpose? Who has access to tutors? Who has test preparation? Who has quiet rooms to study in? Who doesn't need to try and do this while maintaining a full-time job? Why are we pretending these numbers are somehow neutral? Well, we're busy looking at the reservation of seats issue, you know, why the 16 seats out of 100, the racism of this whole process escaped our notice. The real racism is in the medical school's elite status and the fact that it uses standardized test scores and grades to discriminate. Those metrics themselves are racist, and therefore, that school is going to pick nothing but white kids. While we're fighting over the boxes here, we fail to see over the fence who's got enough boxes to look over the fence. We're not asking the question about who put the fence up there in the first place. Why is that fence there? And that's what we need to do if we're really going to build a just world. Racism doesn't just hide in the laws. It hides in what we think is normal. The way most white folks, especially working-class white folks, get taught to think about race is that they're given two choices. One, you can be taughtlerant. You can accept diverse people into your world as long as they talk like you and dress like you, and act like you. That's the so-called liberal option. It's a simple imitation. The idea here is to take people of color and make them more white, who, as we all know, do everything right. The other option is to push back on every other type of person, to keep your culture separate, protect your way of life. Don't let outsiders change anything. That's the so-called conservative option. It's the segregation of the races. This idea involves removing people of color to their own special areas, be it another country or just the ghettos of America. Kindy says both of these options are generally racist, because both of them start with the idea that one group is inherently or naturally better than the other. Assimilationists to say, we're going to let you live here as long as you stop being like you and start being more like us. You need a white person's name. You need to dress like white people. You need to act like white people. You need to go to school like white people. Segregation's going to say, you don't belong here at all. We don't want you here. Go away. Neither one recognizes that different cultures, backgrounds, or experiences don't need to be ranked, that they don't need to be melted down into a single mold or kept locked in their own corner. They just need to be respected. That is, you can treat them equally if differently. So this is sort of the third option, the one that white people don't generally get, whereas people of color in these same countries tend to have to choose either between assimilation or this third option, which is liberation, the kind that dismantles the system of race as a ladder. Anti-racism says, what if there's no ladder here, really at all? What if we stopped ranking human beings by metrics that are inherently biased or more radically still? What if we just stopped ranking people altogether? That's what Kindy's pushing us towards. And yeah, it's pretty radical. It's uncomfortable because it doesn't just ask us to change our opinions. It asks us to give up the lies that made us feel superior or sometimes safe or sometimes included or cared for. It asks us to stop saying, Well, at least I'm not the one at the bottom. And start asking, why is there a bottom in this country? If you've ever felt like the system doesn't care about you either, like your wages are too low or your rent's too high or your future is getting too tight, then let me tell you, liberation is the policy for you because racism doesn't just harm the people. It targets. It also uses people to protect the very system that's kind of screwing everybody over. Kindy calls capitalism and racism twins, born in the same womb for the same purposes. They live together, they support each other, and they will not die unless both go together. So, yeah, anti-racism isn't about being polite. It's about being free, like actually free. And that means tearing the racism out of the roots, not just that from our language or our laws, but from our imaginations. I started by asking the strange question, Does racism have a birthday? And we found that, yeah, it does. Race didn't just come out of nature. It came out of power. It was built not to describe people, but to chop them up, to make exploitation seem like justice, to make inequality look natural. That lie has been passed down for centuries, dressed up in religion, in science and policy, and even in politeness. Racism isn't just wrong. It's a lie that uses people. It tells you the problem is your neighbor, so you won't question your landlord or your boss or the rigged game that keeps everybody scrambling here. Anti-racism is about clarity. It's not about being perfect. It's about being honest. And it's not about hating yourself or your history. It's about refusing to carry someone else's lies any longer as a social construct; it can be changed, even when it feels unrealistic or impossible. It's not. It's just waiting for you to change it, to make the world the way you want it to be. Thanks for tuning in to American Socrates. If today's episode of philosophy got you thinking in new ways, make sure to subscribe so you'll never miss an episode. New full episodes drop every Wednesday. If you enjoyed the show, leave a review. It helps others find us, and it means a lot. And if you know someone who could use a little more practical wisdom in their life, share this episode with them. Want more? Visit Americansocrates.buzzsprout.com for show notes, resources, and exclusive content. You can also follow me on Facebook, Blue Sky, or TikTok to keep the conversation going. Until next time, keep questioning everything.