Even strident Black abolitionists absorbed and repeated racist ideas about their own people

Evidence

No Black person could have read Walker’s intoxicating Appeal without being moved. And yet Walker watered down his appeal by disparaging the very people he was calling upon to resist. Blacks were “the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began,” he proclaimed. He cited the “inhuman system of slavery,” Black ignorance, preachers, and colonizationists as all being responsible for their present plight. In doing so, he regurgitated the theory of how slavery had made Black people inferior. Walker repeated popular racist contrasts of “enlightened Europe” and wretched Africa, contrasts that had been reproduced by the gradual abolitionists, colonizationists, and the very enslavers he so fervently opposed. Walker did not, however, share his opponents’ imaginative version of how enlightened Europe had civilized Africa. He spoke instead of “enlightened … Europe” plunging the “ignorant” fathers of Black people into a “wretchedness ten thousand times more intolerable.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 439

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows assimilationist thinking creeping into even an antiracist text — the degraded/wretched framing is the racist premise, not the antiracist rejection of it.