Northern emancipation laws preserved racial discrimination and racist ideas

Evidence

Few free Blacks had the leisure time to read and write in Banneker’s day. As soon as they shook off slavery’s shackles, the shackles of discrimination clamped down on them. Northern states, in gradually eliminating slave labor during the Revolutionary era, made almost no moves—gradual or otherwise—to end racial discrimination and thereby racist ideas. Proposals to ensure the manageability of African people by former masters, as if they were more naturally slave than free, shadowed abolition proposals. Discriminatory policies were a feature of almost every emancipation law. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 316

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete early-US instance of Kendi’s core inversion: policy (discriminatory emancipation provisions) came before and produced ongoing racist ideas — directly usable for the reader’s stated goal of placing arguments into his scheme. — connects to: Free northern states like Illinois erected legal barriers to black settlement — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 1268