Melville satirized polygenesis with a fictional people embodying its contradictions

Evidence

In Putnam’s competitor, Harper’s Magazine, Herman Melville, who had just authored Moby-Dick, issued “The ‘Gees.” The antiracist satire relentlessly mocked the contradictions of polygenesis. The fictional ‘Gees are a people “ranking pretty high in incivility, but rather low in stature and morals.” They have “a great appetite, but little imagination; a large eyeball, but small insight. Biscuit he crunches, but sentiment he eschews.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 528

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A successful artwork embodies contradictions without falsely resolving them — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 51
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: A successful artwork embodies contradictions without falsely resolving them — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 51