Douglass’s antiracist advocate for Black equality still held assimilationist beauty ideals

Evidence

After effortlessly proving the ancient Egyptians were Black, labeling Types of Mankind the most “compendious and barefaced” attempt ever to “brand the negro with natural inferiority,” and rooting all human differences in environment, Douglass turns from his antiracist best to his racist worst. He references the work of biracial physician James McCune Smith of New York, who had the single greatest influence on Douglass’s life—more than Garrison. At Scotland’s University of Glasgow in the 1830s, Smith had earned bachelor’s, master’s, and medical degrees—the first American of African descent to do so. The hair of Black people was “growing more and more straight,” Smith once rejoiced. “These influences—climate and culture—will ultimately produce a uniform” American of White skin and straight hair. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 531

Categorization

• QUESTION: This is a prime test case for the reader’s discomfort: can someone hold antiracist equality views about policy while remaining assimilationist about culture and appearance? Does Kendi’s scheme handle this nuance?
• XREF: The reader’s stated goal was to test Kendi’s inversion against cases where ideas seem to precede policy — this shows assimilationism surviving inside an antiracist, which complicates the clean three-way scheme.
• DEFINE: Concrete instance of assimilationism: redefining Black bodies as inferior (Black hair as ‘growing more straight’) in favor of a White norm.