Jefferson framed colonization as philanthropy that would repay Black Americans for past injuries

Evidence

Establishing a colony in Africa “may introduce among the aborigines the arts of cultivated life, and the blessing of civilization and science,” he wrote to historian and future Harvard president Jared Sparks on February 4, 1824. Apparently, Black Americans would civilize the continent under the tutelage of those White Americans who had civilized them. It would compensate for “the long course of injuries” they had endured, Jefferson said, such that in the end, America “[would] have rendered them perhaps more good than evil.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 418

Categorization

• XREF: Kendi’s core inversion: the colonizationist ‘benevolent’ framing is a racist idea produced to justify the removal policy, not the other way around.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the ‘On Sacrifice’ article’s theme of benevolent-sounding justifications masking removal/elimination — and to the general mechanism Kendi keeps showing of humane rhetoric gilding supremacist policy.