Jefferson’s view of Native Americans was assimilationist

Evidence

While Jefferson confidently labeled enslaved Africans as inferior to Roman slaves, for Native Americans he cried that the comparison “would be unequal.” While confidently making distinctions between Blacks and Whites, Jefferson equated Native Americans and Whites. As he told François-Jean de Chastellux, who served as liaison between the French and American militaries during the Revolutionary War, Native Americans were “in body and mind equal to the whiteman.” He “supposed the blackman in his present state, might not be so”: “But it would be hazardous to affirm that, equally cultivated for a few generations, he would not become so.” For Jefferson, clarity always seemed to be lacking when it came to racial conceptions. This note proved to be the clearest expression of his assimilationist ideas. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 288

Categorization

• DEFINE: Jefferson’s Native American passage is a textbook statement of assimilationism — equality achievable through cultivation — directly giving the reader a canonical historical instance of the category they must be able to recognize.