Racist assimilationism in its physical form predates cultural assimilationism.

Evidence

Their inferior conditions were neither permanent nor hereditary, however. “Negroes” who migrated to the cooler north were “found to produce descendants whose colour gradually turns white,” Khaldun stressed. Dark-skinned people had the capacity for physical assimilation in a colder climate. Later, cultural assimilationists would imagine that culturally inferior African people, placed in the proper European cultural environment, could or should adopt European culture. But first physical assimilationists like Khaldun imagined that physically inferior African people, placed in the proper cold environment, could or should adopt European physicality: white skin and straight hair. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 45

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘physical assimilationism’ as the precursor of later cultural assimilationism — a key extension of the reader’s three-way scheme.
• XREF: Directly extends the reader’s three-way scheme (segregationist/assimilationist/antiracist): this passage shows assimilationism is not a single modern stance but has a physical, premodern form. Ties to the reader’s existing article on sacrifice-era hierarchy too. — connects to: Bodily notions of inherited difference preceded fully secular modern racism.