Even direct evidence could not dislodge Franklin’s racist ideology justifying slavery

Evidence

On a visit home in 1763 during his nearly two decades of residence in Europe, Benjamin Franklin saw some Black exhibits at a Philadelphia school run by the Associates of Dr. Thomas Bray. The London-based educational group had been named in 1731 after the deceased organizer of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Assessing the pupils, Franklin gained “a higher opinion of the natural capacities of the black Race.” Some Blacks could “adopt our Language or Customs,” he admitted. But that seemed to be all Franklin could concede, probably recognizing that the production of racist ideas was essential to substantiating slavery. Seven years later, in lobbying the crown for Georgia’s harsh slave code, Franklin argued that the “majority” of slaves was “of a plotting Disposition, dark, sullen, malicious, revengeful, and cruel in the highest Degree.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 249

Categorization

• XREF: Kendi’s core inversion in action: policy interest (Georgia slave code) produces the racist fabrication, overriding firsthand contrary evidence — the reader’s central thesis to test.
• QUESTION: Franklin witnessed educated Black pupils yet reverted to ‘plotting, cruel’ stereotypes when lobbying for harsher slave law — the single best concrete case in this chapter for policy-before-ideas, worth testing against cases where ideas genuinely precede policy.
• ADDENDUM: Franklin’s ‘dark, sullen, malicious, revengeful, and cruel’ slave-code construction parallels the immodesty-panic pattern of inventing moral traits to justify an oppressive regime.