Assimilationist anti-slavery rhetoric still asserted inherent Black inferiority

Evidence

William Lloyd Garrison penned the preface to Douglass’s 1845 Narrative. Enslavement had “degraded” Black people “in the scale of humanity,” Garrison claimed. “Nothing has been left undone to cripple their intellects, darken their minds, debase their moral nature, obliterate all traces of their relationship to mankind.” Though starting at different places and taking different conceptual routes, Garrison kept arriving in the same racist place as his enslaving enemies—subhuman Black inferiority. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 489

Categorization

• XREF: Directly tests the reader’s stated discomfort: assimilationism as a racist position. Garrison’s preface is a canonical example of the well-meaning racist assimilationist the reader wants to recognize. — connects to: Abolitionists against slavery could still defend segregation and white supremacy — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 260
• DEFINE: Illustrates the assimilationist pole of Kendi’s three-way scheme via a concrete historical example: argue Blacks are degraded but improvable, needing cultivation to become ‘ornaments’ to society.
• SEED: Possible essay: ‘The Abolitionist Racist’ — how uplift logic smuggles in the very inferiority it claims to refute, using Garrison’s preface as the anchor case.