American elites adopted Darwin to justify growing national inequities.

Evidence

Over the course of the 1860s, the Western reception of Darwin transformed from opposition to skepticism to approval to hailing praise. The sensitive, private, and sickly Darwin let his many friends develop his ideas and engage his critics. The mind of English polymath Herbert Spencer became the ultimate womb for Darwin’s ideas, his writings the amplifier of what came to be known as Social Darwinism. In Principles of Biology in 1864, Spencer coined the iconic phrase “survival of the fittest.” He religiously believed that human behavior was inherited. Superior hereditary traits made the “dominant races” better fit to survive than the “inferior races.” Spencer spent the rest of his life calling for governments to get out of the way of the struggle for existence. In his quest to limit government, Spencer ignored the discriminators, probably knowing they were rigging the struggle for existence. Longing for ideas to justify the nation’s growing inequities, American elites firmly embraced Charles Darwin and fell head over heels for Herbert Spencer. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 560

Categorization

• QUESTION: The line ‘Longing for ideas to justify the nation’s growing inequities’ — does the inequity really precede the adoption here, or does Darwin’s arrival merely coincide with antebellum expansion? Worth testing against the reader’s policy-first model.
• XREF: Directly addresses the reader’s core concern: does this counterexample (a scientific idea arriving before policy use) break the policy-first inversion? Kendi’s framing implies the inequities were already there seeking justification.