Even thinkers who reject colour-based theories still rank races by whiteness.

Evidence

Boyle had jumped into the ring of the racial debate with Of the Nature of Whiteness and Blackness. He rejected both curse and climate theorists and knocked up a foundational antiracist idea: “The Seat” of human pigmentation “seems to be but the thin Epidermes, or outward Skin,” he wrote. And yet, this antiracist idea of skin color being only skin deep did not stop Boyle from judging different colors. Black skin, he maintained, was an “ugly” deformity of normal Whiteness. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 107

Categorization

• XREF: A perfect early specimen of Kendi’s claim that even non-race-first frameworks (here a proto-antiracist skin-deep claim) can still carry racial hierarchy — parallels today’s ‘colorblind’ racists. Strong example for the reader’s goal of placing arguments into the three-way scheme.
• DEFINE: Shows a proto-antiracist position (skin color is only skin deep) coexisting with overt anti-Black judgment — a useful calibration case for distinguishing antiracist from assimilationist/segregationist claims.