Scientific-method prestige made racist Reconstruction historiography appear objectively true.

Evidence

At the time, William Archibald Dunning reigned as the director of Columbia University’s preeminent Dunning School of Reconstruction history. The school was at the forefront of an academic revolution highlighting the “objective” use of the scientific method in the humanities. “For the first time meticulous and thorough research was carried on in an effort to determine the truth rather than to prove a thesis,” was how one historian described the impact of the Dunning School in the American Historical Review in 1940. The “truth,” though, meant Dunning school historians of the Reconstruction era chronicling the White South as victimized by the corrupt and incompetent Black politicians, and the North mistakenly forcing Reconstruction before quickly correcting itself and leaving the noble White South to its own wits. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 754

Categorization

• XREF: Directs the intellectual scaffolding behind Kendi’s inversion to the Dunning School’s fake objectivity — works as a test case of whether ‘objective’ method can still produce racist ideas, the very position Kendi says follows policy.