Segregationist laws preceded and produced the idea of Black inferiority

Evidence

The defeat of the Force Bill ended Republican efforts to enforce the Thirteenth (emancipation) and Fourteenth (civil rights) and Fifteenth (voting) Amendments. If the Bargain of federal noninterference was consummated in 1876, then after years of northern and southern reticence, it became the undisputed national policy in the 1890s and in the first decade of the twentieth century. A series of separate but (un)equal laws was instituted, segregating nearly every aspect of southern life, from water fountains, to businesses, to transportation—all to ensure White solidarity and Black submission and to ensure cheap Black labor. These separate and inferior Black facilities fed Whites and Blacks alike the segregationist idea of Blacks being a fundamentally separate and inferior people. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 722

Categorization

• XREF: Textbook instantiation of Kendi’s causal inversion — policy driven by self-interest (cheap Black labor, White solidarity) first, racist ideas produced to justify it. This is the exact move the reader wants to master and test. — connects to: Segregated Black schooling itself enacted a revolutionary anticolonial pedagogy — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 11; Segregation’s core harm was discursive inferiorization, not separation itself — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1181
• DEFINE: Shows what a segregationist policy-and-idea loop looks like: separate laws feed the idea of separate inferiority.