An educated Black Jamaican adopted the assimilationist posture to gain white acceptance

Evidence

Sometime between 1738 and 1740, Williams returned home, probably donning a white wig of curls over his dark skin and assimilated mind. He opened a grammar school for slaveholders’ children and penned fawning Latin odes to every colonial governor of Jamaica. His 1758 anti-Black poem to Governor George Haldane read: “Tho’ dark the stream on which the tribute flows, / Not from the skin, but from the heart it rose.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 245

Categorization

• DEFINE: Francis Williams personifies Kendi’s assimilationist category: he proves himself capable of Whiteness precisely to earn standing, yet the poem still genuflects to white authority.
• SHARE: The image of a Black schoolmaster in a white wig penning Latin odes to slaveholding governors is narrow enough that only someone studying colonial intellectual history would relish it.