Black corruption scandals served as a manufactured excuse to abandon Reconstruction

Evidence

Though the bribers and the bribed knew corruption was a national affair, primarily among White politicians, racist ideas never did quite subscribe to the magazine of reality. Black corruption was a ready-made excuse to abandon the increasingly difficult, expensive, disordering, and divisive Reconstruction policies. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 681

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences Kendi’s causal inversion — self-interested abandonment of policy precedes the racist idea that justifies it. This is the reader’s core test case for the book’s thesis.
• DEFINE: Shows the mechanism of ‘manufactured excuse’ — an idea produced deliberately to justify pre-existing policy interest, the heart of Kendi’s scheme.