Labor-demand policy drove the racist canard that Africans were strong and Indians weak.

Evidence

In 1515, he departed for Spain, where he would conduct a lifelong campaign to ease the suffering of Native Americans, and, possibly more importantly—solve the settlers’ extreme labor shortage. In one of his first written pleas in 1516, Las Casas suggested importing enslaved Africans to replace the rapidly declining Native American laborers, a plea he made again two years later. … In time, some indigenous peoples had caught wind of this new racist idea, and they readily agreed that a policy of importing African laborers would be better. An indigenous group in Mexico complained that the “difficult and arduous work” involved in harnessing a sugar crop was “only for the blacks and not for the thin and weak Indians.” Las Casas and company birthed twins—racist twins that some Native Americans and Africans took in: the myth of the physically strong, beastly African, and the myth of the physically weak Native American who easily died from the strain of hard labor. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 60

Categorization

• XREF: This is a clean early demonstration of Kendi’s core causal inversion (policy before racist idea) applied to colonial labor. Also resonates with 1619 Project accounts of how the labor shortage preceded racial rationalization.
• DEFINE: Illustrates the definitional point that ‘racist twins’ (complimentary stereotypes of strength and weakness across two groups) serve a single labor policy.
• CANDY: The irony that even some indigenous peoples adopted the racist idea about their own weakness is a striking, conversation-ready detail.