In 1839 scholarly consensus held that racial equality did not exist

Evidence

But antiracists had to contend against both powerful antislavery assimilationists and the even more powerful proslavery segregationists. Whig evangelist Calvin Colton demanded action against antislavery in Abolition a Sedition and A Voice from America to England in 1839. “There is no such thing as equality among men, nor can there be,” Colton wrote. “Neither God nor man ever instituted equality.” Science affirmed Colton’s view. There was a virtual consensus among scholars—from Cambridge in Massachusetts to Cambridge in England—that racial equality did not exist. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 477

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s project: the ‘Ιgnorance leads to hate’ model fails here because these scholars were highly educated and still produced segregationist science — a test case for Kendi’s inversion.