Providing enslaved people to Agassiz promoted slavery rather than proving racial inferiority.

Evidence

In my head, I reasoned that Sancho had to play the game. He knew that he had to appease his master. I also thought it was ironic that the Taylors celebrated the fact that Sancho could read and write. If Sancho was a learned man, like Papa Renty, I thought, why would the Taylors support Agassiz’s theories by supplying examples of what they must have thought was an inferior race? It was all so confusing. I was puzzled. If the Taylors knew about enslaved people’s literacy, how could they support Agassiz’s theories? The whole purpose was to prove Black inferiority, and this story that Dr. Taylor had just shared did the opposite. This reconfirmed that supplying people he had enslaved to Agassiz as subjects was not about proving Black inferiority: it was about the promotion of slavery. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 478

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s framing of property law as the afterlife of slavery; Agassiz’s photographic project was the same act of treating enslaved people as objects/evidence.