Assimilationist gradualism recycled racist readiness rationales for empire

Evidence

Du Bois’s rationale for gradual decolonization—Black nations were not ready for independence—echoed the old racist rationales for gradual emancipation—Black people were not ready for freedom. Du Bois echoed those proclaiming in 1899 that Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, the colonies the United States had received from winning the 1898 Spanish-American War, were not ready for independence. Segregationists and antiracists opposed, while assimilationists supported, the formal launching of the American Empire. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 750

Categorization

• DEFINE: A clean illustration of the assimilationist position as Kendi defines it: gradual advancement toward White ideals, which here means endorsing colonial empire.
• SEED: Possible essay: assimilationism as the ‘respectable’ face of empire — Du Bois and Kipling on the same side over white-man’s-burden gradualism.
• XREF: Sets up the reader’s plan to place any argument into segregationist/assimilationist/antiracist buckets — this is a graded example of an assimilationist disguise. — connects to: Early geopoliticians rationalized imperial expansion through national destiny ideologies — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1741; Nineteenth-century racial Anglo-Saxonism coexisted with assimilationist cosmopolitanism — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 199