Even a proponent of African knowledge dismissed the wisdom as primitive

Evidence

Cotton Mather, however, became an early believer when he read an essay on inoculation in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1714. He then interviewed Africans around Boston to be sure. Sharing their inoculation stories, they gave him a window into the intellectual culture of West Africa. He had trouble grasping it, instead complaining about how “brokenly and blunderingly and like Idiots they tell the Story.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 181

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows the assimilationist move in miniature: Mather takes the African practice seriously as data but cannot credit its source as thinkers — ‘they stumbled on it, we systematized it’ — a clean illustration of the assimilationist stance the reader needs to recognize.