Abolitionism and proslavery theology shared a paternalist denial of Black self-determination

Evidence

“We are in a high Station, and enjoy greater Favours than they,” Woolman theorized. God had endowed White Christians with “distinguished Gifts.” By sanctioning slavery, America was “misusing his Gifts.” Woolman planted his groundbreaking abolitionist tree in the same racist soil that proslavery theologians like Cotton Mather—preaching divine slavery—had used a century ago. Their divergences over slavery itself obscured their parallel political racism that denied Black people self-determination. Mather’s proslavery theological treatises proclaimed masters divinely charged to care for the degraded race of natural servants. Woolman’s antislavery treatise proclaimed Christians to be divinely charged with “greater Favours” to emancipate, Christianize, and care for the degraded slaves. But whether they were to be given eternal slavery or eventual emancipation, enslaved Africans would be acted upon as dependent children reliant on White enslavers or abolitionists for their fate. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 220

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to mastering the segregationist vs. assimilationist distinction — Woolman’s emancipation-with-guardianship is assimilationism in its purest early form. — connects to: Paternalist abolitionists reproduced rather than abolished racial hierarchy — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 907; The leading southern Baptist theologian felt no moral qualm about owning slaves — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 105; Douglass denied any contradiction between women’s self-sacrifice and self-development — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 1408
• ADDENDUM: Parallels the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ piece in showing how a putatively liberating stance can encode the same hierarchy it claims to oppose.