Rush’s abolitionist environmental theory of Black inferiority was still a racist idea

Evidence

In fact, those unsubstantiated vices attributed to Black people were the offspring of the illogically racist mind. Were captives really lazier, more deceitful, and more crooked than their enslavers? It was the latter who forced others to work for them, treacherously whipping them when they did not, and stealing the proceeds of their labor when they did. In any case, Rush was the first activist to commercialize the persuasive, though racist, abolitionist theory that slavery made Black people inferior. Whether benevolent or not, any idea that suggests that Black people as a group are inferior, that something is wrong with Black people, is a racist idea. Slavery was killing, torturing, raping, and exploiting people, tearing apart families, snatching precious time, and locking captives in socioeconomic desolation. The confines of enslavement were producing Black people who were intellectually, psychologically, culturally, and behaviorally different, not inferior. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 253

Categorization

• DEFINE: The definition of a racist idea here — ‘any idea that suggests that Black people as a group are inferior’ — functions regardless of the proposed cause, a precise placement tool for the three-way scheme.
• ADDENDUM: This passage shows the environmental/assimilationist position in its earliest American form and thus grounds the modern antiracist-vs-assimilationist distinction the reader wants to master; also connects to the sacrificial framing of Black bodies across the book.