European racism toward Black people intensified as formal abolition advanced

Evidence

In fact, Black people were losing ground daily in the opinions of European nations. Not long after Gregoire and Jefferson exchanged letters, London was blitzed with a broadsheet picturing a seminude African woman standing sideways to the viewer, her oversized buttocks exposed on one side, the unseen side draped in animal skin. A headband wraps her forehead, and she holds a body-sized stick. Whitening Blacks, Black exhibits, and “converted Hottentots,” sharing their supposed journeys from savagery to civilization, were becoming less remarkable with each passing year. But Londoners were captivated by Sarah Baartman, or rather, her enormous buttocks and genitalia. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 363

Categorization

• XREF: The pattern that antiracist policy and racist ideas move inversely connects to the reader’s existing notes on how ‘progress’ narratives often mask ideological regression.