Free Blacks had internalized racist myths about Africa despite rejecting colonization

Evidence

These Black men had walked into the church fuming. Their wives, girlfriends, sisters, and mothers were probably angry, too (but were disallowed from proclaiming it at the male-only meeting). The meeting attendees audaciously denounced the “unmerited stigma” that Henry Clay had “cast upon the reputation of the free people of color.” They did not want to go to the “savage wilds of Africa,” the attendees resolved, demonstrating that they had already consumed those racist myths. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 392

Categorization

• DEFINE: A striking instance of what Kendi would call assimilationist thinking: the men reject White supremacy while simultaneously absorbing its portrait of Africa as ‘savage,’ using it as a reason to stay in America.
• DEEPTHINKING: This is a subtle, unsettling point: resistance to racist policy can coexist with full internalization of racist ideas about the pejorated population and land. It complicates any simple ‘resistance = antiracist’ equation and deserves careful handling in the reader’s three-way placement scheme.