Insurance companies produced scientific racism to justify denying coverage to Black customers

Evidence

At “the time of emancipation,” he wrote, southern Blacks were “healthy in body and cheerful in mind.” “What are the conditions thirty years after?” Well, “in the plain language of the facts,” free Blacks were headed toward “gradual extinction,” pulled down by their natural immoralities, law-breaking, and diseases. Hoffman supplied his employer with an excuse for its discriminatory policies concerning African Americans—that is, for denying them life insurance. White life insurance companies refused to insure a supposedly dying race. Yet another racist idea was produced to defend a racist policy. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 742

Categorization

• XREF: Perfect textbook instance of Kendi’s core inversion: policy (denying insurance) precedes and generates the justifying idea (Black extinction). Directly reinforces the asymmetry thesis under test.
• DEFINE: Showcases the causal direction: the racist policy came first, the racist idea (science) was produced to defend it.