Antiracist advances drive racists to produce new justifications for inequality

Evidence

Edward Long watched the rising tidal wave of abolitionism and antiracism from his massive sugar plantation in Jamaica. He realized that a new racial justification was badly needed to save slavery from being abolished. So, in 1774, he breathed new life into polygenesis by issuing his massive book History of Jamaica. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 261

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the countermovement dynamic — each egalitarian gain in a racialized society prompts a retooled racist ideology rather than a retreat; Long’s polygenesis revival as a case study of ideological arms-racing.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s chosen test of Kendi’s inversion: here the racist idea (polygenesis) is produced precisely because policy pressure from abolitionism threatened slavery — the idea is born from the policy threat, not ignorance.