Belittling the oppressed to defend racist policy dates back six centuries

Evidence

Defending racist policy by belittling Black folk: that had been the vocation of producers of racist ideas for nearly six centuries, since Gomes Eanes de Zurara first produced these ideas to defend the African slave-trading of Portugal’s Prince Henry. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1234

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates the book’s core inversion — policy (slave-trading) precedes idea-production (racist ideology justifying it), linking this chapter back to the Zurara episode from earlier sections.
• QUESTION: Worth testing the reader’s stated counterexample here: does Zurara’s case hold that the policy truly preceded the ideas, or did pre-existing ideas about African inferiority enable Prince Henry’s policy?