Even antiracist anthropologists smuggled civilizational hierarchy into their relativism.

Evidence

Montagu exposed the dangerous myth of biological racial hierarchy and shared the antiracist concept that “all cultures must be judged in relation to their own history … and definitely not by the arbitrary standard of any single culture.” Montagu did not always follow his own advice, however. In his “example of cultural relativity,” he judged that in the past 5,000 years, while European cultures will have advanced, “the kingdoms of Africa have undergone comparatively little change.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 908

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: is Montagu’s lapse the classic assimilationist thought pattern — judging other cultures against a European standard while professing cultural relativity? Does it fit Kendi’s scheme as assimilationism hiding inside antiracist packaging?
• XREF: This is a concrete case for the reader’s expressed discomfort: even a professional antiracist falls into assimilationist framing, supporting Kendi’s claim that assimilationism is the default habitat of well-meaning people.
• DEEPTHINKING: The book’s central taxonomic challenge in miniature: how to tell performative antiracism from the real thing, and whether professed norms versus operational judgments decide.