Cotton profits motivated suppression of antislavery and antiracist ideas

Evidence

Over the next few decades, slaveholders marched their captives onto the new western lands, terrorizing them into planting new cotton and sugar fields, sending the crops to northern and British factories, and powering the Industrial Revolution. Southern planters and northern investors grew rich. With so much money to make, antislavery and antiracist ideas were whipped to the side like antislavery, antiracist Africans. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 349

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The closing metaphor maps the disposal of ideas onto the physical violence of the enslaved — profits ‘whip to the side’ both antiracist ideas and antiracist Africans, collapsing the symbolic and the material into one image.