Agassiz’s racial claims directly contradict the known character of Renty

Evidence

Agassiz claimed that Africans had the intellectual capacity of a seven-month-old fetus, still in the womb of its mother. … My mother said that Papa Renty was a self-taught educator who had mastered Noah Webster’s speller on his own. … Agassiz posited that Africans were submissive, obsequious, imitative. … Everything that I knew about my Papa Renty, and that I saw in that photo, was that he was obstinate, proud, and defiant. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 176

Categorization

• CANDY: The deadpan juxtaposition — fetus-level intellect vs. a man who taught himself Webster’s speller — carries sharp rhetorical force.