Locke’s egalitarian blank-slate doctrine quietly assumed a white mind

Evidence

In any society, the mind “at first … is rasa tabula,” Locke famously wrote in An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. If people are born without innate intelligence, then there cannot be a natural intellectual hierarchy. But Locke’s egalitarian idea had a caveat. As Boyle and Newton painted unblemished light white, Locke more or less painted the unblemished mind white. Locke used the term “white paper” much more often than “blank slate” or “tabula rasa” to describe the child’s “as yet unprejudiced Understanding.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 119

Categorization

• XREF: Perfect articulation of Kendi’s point that even ideas that seem egalitarian (blank slate = no innate hierarchy) can smuggle in racialized assumptions (the mind painted white). Directly usable for placing arguments in his three-way scheme.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: how egalitarian framings can covertly assume a raced default — ‘white paper’ as the invisible baseline in putatively universalist doctrines.