Cotton Mather’s racist ideas were shaped chiefly by reading contemporaries.

Evidence

Cotton Mather was not the sole progenitor of such ideas, however. He was influenced by the books he read by his contemporaries. And few, if any, books influenced Cotton Mather’s racist ideas more than Richard Baxter’s A Christian Directory. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 113

Categorization

• XREF: This is the seed of Kendi’s causal inversion — the intellectual pedigree chain of racist ideas, which the reader’s goal of mapping arguments into the three-way scheme depends on. — connects to: Racist ideas precede and motivate the reading of negative portrayals — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 849
• QUESTION: Kendi stresses how racist books shaped Mather, showing ideas transmitted through text. How does this fit the overall thesis that ideas follow policy rather than precede it?
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Racist ideas precede and motivate the reading of negative portrayals — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 849

Broader Connections

• Racist ideas precede and motivate the reading of negative portrayals #complicates (0.82) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 849