Khaldun’s climate theory of African inferiority seeded the assimilationist view of race

Evidence

Ibn Khaldun did not intend merely to demean African people as inferior. He intended to belittle all the different-looking African and Slavic peoples whom the Muslims were trading as slaves. Even so, he reinforced the conceptual foundation for racist ideas. On the eve of the fifteenth century, Khaldun helped bolster the foundation for assimilationist ideas, for racist notions of the environment producing African inferiority. All an enslaver had to do was to stop justifying Slavic slavery and inferiority using climate theory, and focus the theory on African people, for the racist attitude toward dark-skinned people to be complete. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 46

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explicitly links environmental/climate determinism to assimilationist racist ideas, as opposed to segregationist genetic inferiority.
• XREF: Directly builds the book’s core three-way scheme — this passage shows how ‘environment producing inferiority’ is the assimilationist variant.