Colonizationists opposed slavery yet feared free Blacks as a rebellious working class.

Evidence

Mercer was an antislavery, anti-abolitionist slaveholder like Jefferson. Although “slavery is wrong,” he later wrote, emancipation “would do more harm than good.” … Mercer wanted to remake his region’s agrarian, slave-labor economy into a free-labor, industrial economy. He dreaded the working-class revolts that were picking up steam in Western Europe, but had faith in the ability of a public education system to placate lowerand middle-income Whites. Yet he recognized that the rampant racial discrimination in America would fashion free Blacks into a perpetually rebellious working class. He wanted to expel Blacks from the United States before it was too late. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 385

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates Kendi’s core inversion: economic/political self-interest (fear of a rebellious working class in an industrializing economy) generates the racist policy of colonization, with racist ideas (Blacks as permanently rebellious) produced to justify it.
• DEFINE: Shows the segregationist logic of colonization emerging from an antislavery position, key to placing arguments in Kendi’s three-way scheme.