Phillips made paternalist slavery myths seem objective through plantation archives.

Evidence

His most notable student was Georgia native Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. In American Negro Slavery (1918), along with eight more books and a duffel bag of articles, Phillips erased the truth of slavery as a highly lucrative enterprise dominated by planters who incessantly forced a resisting people to labor through terror, manipulation, and racist ideas. Instead he dreamed up an unprofitable commerce dominated by benevolent, paternalistic planters civilizing and caring for a “robust, amiable, obedient and content” barbaric people. Phillips’s pioneering use of plantation documents legitimated his racist dreams and made them seem like objective realities. Phillips remained the most respected scholarly voice on slavery until the mid-twentieth century. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 755

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how ‘primary source pioneer’ status certified racist scholarship, and what epistemic shield a transcript or archive really provides when selection is ideological.