Physical assimilationists endorsed whitening Blacks as the cure for racial problems

Evidence

Amid the illogic and perpetual challenges to racist ideas over the course of the nineteenth century, superior Whiteness found a normalizing shield in blackface minstrelsy. … P. T. Barnum, of course, would go on to become one of the greatest showmen in American history, exhibiting all kinds of “freaks,” including whitening Blacks. Physical assimilationists continued to view them with pleasure, declaring that skin-color change was what would eventually cure the nation’s racial ills. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 454

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s goal of placing arguments into Kendi’s three-way scheme — this is a pure physical-assimilationist position, where behavior (skin color change) rather than policy is treated as the cure. Useful counterpoint to Kendi’s core claim that policy should precede ideas.
• SEED: Barnum’s Joice Heth exhibit as an early example where entertainment/popular culture manufactured and reinforced racist ideas — could feed an article on how ‘harmless’ spectacle launders ideology.