Enlightenment light imagery fused Whiteness with reason and Blackness with ignorance.

Evidence

For Enlightenment intellectuals, the metaphor of light typically had a double meaning. Europeans had rediscovered learning after a thousand years in religious darkness, and their bright continental beacon of insight existed in the midst of a “dark” world not yet touched by light. Light, then, became a metaphor for Europeanness, and therefore Whiteness, a notion that Benjamin Franklin and his philosophical society eagerly embraced and imported to the colonies. … Enlightenment ideas gave legitimacy to this long-held racist “partiality,” the connection between lightness and Whiteness and reason, on the one hand, and between darkness and Blackness and ignorance, on the other. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 200

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the reader’s environmental-silence work: light serves here as Whiteness’s ‘keynote’ symbol, organizing perception the way soundscape keynotes do.
• DEFINE: Establishes the pre-history of the ignorant-Black trope that Kendi’s later antiracist positions must counter.