Racist ideas arrived with colonists before American slavery existed.

Evidence

From the first ships that landed in Virginia in 1607, to the ships that survived the Great Hurricane of 1635, to the first slave ships, some British settlers of colonial America carried across the sea Puritan, biblical, scientific, and Aristotelian rationalizations of slavery and human hierarchy. From Western Europe and the new settlements in Latin America, some Puritans carried across their judgment of the many African peoples as one inferior people. They carried across racist ideas—racist ideas that preceded American slavery, because the need to justify African slavery preceded colonial America. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 42

Categorization

• XREF: This is the crux of Kendi’s causal inversion — racist ideas precede slavery because justifying slavery precedes slavery itself. Directly testable against the reader’s goal.
• QUESTION: Kendi says racist ideas preceded slavery, but on his own model ideas follow policy. Here the ‘policy to justify’ is slavery elsewhere (Latin America, Caribbean), not yet the American institution — worth clarifying how the justification need itself counts as a form of racist power.