Bufon treated Africans as changeable inferiors rather than fixed racial others.

Evidence

Buffon distinguished six races or varieties of a single human species (and the Khoi people of South Africa he placed with monkeys). He positioned Africans “between the extremes of barbarism and of civilization.” They had “little knowledge” of the “arts and sciences,” and their language was “without rules,” said Buffon. As a climate theorist and monogenesist, Buffon did not believe these qualities were fixed in stone. If Africans were imported to Europe, then their color would gradually change and become “perhaps as white as the natives” of Europe. It was in Europe where “we behold the human form in its greatest perfection,” and where “we ought to form our ideas of the real and natural colour of man.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 213

Categorization

• XREF: This is the climate-theory monogenesis Kendi’s framework needs to distinguish from later hierarchical polygenesis; connects forward to Jefferson’s consumption of these ideas.
• DEFINE: Shows the monogenesist/climate-theory stance: one human species, differences mutable — a genuine alternative to segregationist fixed hierarchy that still ranks white Europe highest.