Even leading abolitionists absorbed cultural racism explaining Black inferiority by environment

Evidence

Leaning on Smith’s climate theory and cultural racism, Douglass asked the students in Cleveland, “Need we go behind the vicissitudes of barbarism for an explanation of the gaunt, wiry, apelike appearance of some of the genuine Negroes? Need we look higher than a vertical sun, or lower than the damp, black soil [of West Africa] … for an explanation of the Negro’s color?” While Douglass beat the vicissitudes of barbarism into Africa, he ascribed “the very heart of the civilized world” into England. He had emerged as the most famous Black male abolitionist and assimilationist in the United States. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 532

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clear exhibit of assimilationism masking as environmental, non-biological explanation — the climate theory that still cedes White Europe as the standard.
• XREF: connects to: Paternalist abolitionists reproduced rather than abolished racial hierarchy — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 907; White abolitionist films erase black agency and depict slaves as passive recipients of emancipation — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists:…, 53