Horror at Nazi racism turned White intellectuals against Jim Crow

Evidence

Fearful of alienating segregationists, Roosevelt did not use his power to ram the anti-lynching bill, which was still on life support, through Congress. … But it was those very Nazi doctrines—and the mass murders of German Jews, which began in 1938—that were enraging White intellectuals and turning them off from Jim Crow. In December 1938, in a unanimous resolution, the American Anthropological Association denounced biological racism. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 879

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete case of international events (Nazi genocide) reshaping domestic racist ideas — adjacent to the reader’s concern about whether ideas sometimes precede policy, since here antiracist ideas arise from an external moral shock, not directly from Black self-interest.