Even Blumenbach’s anti-polygenesis environmentalism ranked Europeans first

Evidence

If someone had told Lord Kames that a German doctoral student, fifty-six years his junior, would lead the initial charge against his theory of polygenesis, the old jurist would probably have laughed. And he was known for his sense of humor. Unlike Lord Kames, “I have written this book quite unprejudiced,” the audacious young Johann Friedrich Blumenbach claimed in On the Natural Variety of Mankind. Environment—not separate creations—caused the “variety in humans,” the German wrote in 1775. … “The first and most important to us … is that of Europe,” he theorized. “All these nations regarded as a whole are white in colour, and if compared with the rest, beautiful in form.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 265

Categorization

• XREF: Key discomfort case for the reader: even the thinker who ‘led the initial charge’ against polygenesis held a racial hierarchy with Europe on top — bears on whether ‘environmental’ positions escape Kendi’s assimilationist category.
• QUESTION: Is Blumenbach’s Eurocentric environmentalism, which rejects separate species but ranks whites highest, an early example of Kendi’s assimilationist camp?