Colonization was a reform effort to preserve a white American ethnostate against racial equality

Evidence

As slavery grew, so too did the cries to abolish it. Still, many white people, even those who were anti-slavery, couldn’t stomach the idea of Black equality. A solution was found in the idea of colonization: freeing and “civilizing” Black people, then sending them out of the country. The idea had been proposed by Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1785. This new form of racial progress envisioned the United States as a white ethnostate that avoided what Jefferson argued would be a never-ending race war. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1256

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reading purpose’s note that ‘origin stories are infrastructure’ — this is about how early American racial ideology framed equality itself as the problem. Also echoes the addendum article on class/identity signaling. — connects to: Settler titles frame land reform as ruination of an Edenic white paradise — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists:…, 68
• DEFINE: Defines what ‘colonization’ meant in Jefferson-era racial politics: not a marginal scheme but a mainstream reform positioned between slavery and equality.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the ideological ancestor of modern ‘separate but equal’ and back-to-Africa movements lies in a compromise that rejected both slavery and equality — a useful genealogy of the ‘ethnostate’ reformist temptation.