Abolitionism could succeed by keeping racist premises and only changing their implications

Evidence

In one novel, Stowe ingeniously achieved what Garrison had been trying to do for roughly two decades in article after article in The Liberator. For the cosmic shift to antislavery, Stowe did not ask Americans to change their deep-seated beliefs. She asked only for them to alter the implications, the meaning of their deep-seated beliefs. Stowe met Americans where they were: in the concreteness of racist ideas. She accepted the nationally accepted premise of the enslaver. Naturally docile and intellectually inferior Black people were disposed to their enslavement to White people—and, Stowe crucially tacked on—to God. Stowe inverted Cotton Mather and all those preachers after him who had spent years trying to convince planters that Christianity made Blacks better slaves. She claimed that since docile Blacks made the best slaves, they made the best Christians. Since domineering Whites made the worst slaves, they made the worst Christians. Stowe offered Christian salvation to White America through antislavery. In order to become better Christians, White people must constrain their domineering temperament and end the evil outgrowth of that temperament: slavery. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 513

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is a powerful instance of Kendi’s central distinction: assimilationist antiracism operates from within racist premises rather than overturning them.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s goal of placing arguments into Kendi’s three-way scheme — Stowe’s approach typifies assimilationism, meeting racists ‘where they are.’ — connects to: White-labor versus black comparisons served to deflect abolition, not broaden it. — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 307; Abolitionism was necessarily also an antiracist movement because slavery ran on racial technologies. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 89; Abolitionists against slavery could still defend segregation and white supremacy — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 260 (+1 more)
• SEED: Could become an essay on how the most effective social change often proceeds by altering implications rather than premises — a tactical claim about persuasion.