Separate-but-equal was invented to sell inequality as equality.

Evidence

In April 1885, Grady issued his “official” reply in Century Magazine to Cable and other assimilationist and antiracist critics: “The assortment of races is wise and proper, and stands on the platform of equal accommodations for each race but separate.” With that statement, Grady birthed the New South’s defense of racial segregation. The system of separation had been created to ensure racial inequality, yet Grady propagated the notion that it was intended to ensure racial equality and bring racial progress. Truth never did stop the concocters of racist ideas. Grady had a separate-but-equal brand to invent, to defend, and to sell to the American mind. And millions of Americans bought it in the 1880s. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 702

Categorization

• DEFINE: The origin moment of ‘separate but equal’ as a brand — the reader’s framework locates this as a segregationist idea marketed as if antiracist.
• SEED: Grady as marketing genius of racism — ‘branding’ inequality as equality — is a sharp angle linking PR history to political theory.
• XREF: connects to: Competition’s logic makes inequality normative wherever it spreads. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 114; Formal equal right applied to unequal individuals necessarily produces inequality. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 416