Colonizationists used ancient Egyptian precedent to justify recolonizing Africa

Evidence

T.R. cited Jefferson’s old friend Count Constantine Volney, the French historian who forty years earlier had said the ancient Egyptians were of African descent. After several pages passionately demonstrating that the ancient Egyptians were African, T.R. declared that America should “carry back by colonies to Africa, now in barbarism, the blessings which … were received from her.” Civilization was supposedly exhausted in Africa, but awakened in Europe, T.R. stated. But how did the originators of civilization produce such a region of ignorance and barbarism? How did they forget the arts and sciences? These questions were not asked, and they went unanswered. As assimilationists, the only point colonizationists like T.R. tried to make was that since Africans had been civilized in an earlier time, they could be civilized once again. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 420

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates the assimilationist logic: Africans were civilized once, so they can be civilized again — the reasoning that makes colonizationist schemes assimilationist, not segregationist.
• SEED: A piece on how racist projects recycle ‘once-civilized, fallen’ narratives — the same shape appears across colonization, civilizing missions, and modern development discourse.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s goal of placing arguments into Kendi’s three-way scheme — this is a model assimilationist claim that predates most of the book’s later assimilationists.