An ACS writer rebutted polygenesis by citing Black Africa’s thousand-year civilization

Evidence

In another piece, entitled “Observations on the Early History of the Negro Race,” a writer identified as “T.R.” took aim at polygenesists who spoke of Black people as a separate species, incapable of civilization, or “the connecting link between men and monkies.” The polygenesists must not know, T.R. wrote, “that the people who they traduce, were for more than a thousand years … the most enlightened on the globe.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 419

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: even within the ‘anti-racist’ rebuttals of polygenesis, the argument runs on the same supremacist scale — valuing Black people by their ancient civilizations rather than rejecting the hierarchy itself. A critique of civilizational-merit framing.