Slave traders knowingly spread false claims about Africans to justify their profits.

Evidence

These Enlightenment counterpoints arose, conveniently, at a time when Western Europe’s triangular transatlantic trade was flourishing. … Producers of this racist idea had to know their tales were false. But they went on producing them anyway to justify their lucrative commerce in human beings. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 201

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences the reader’s core test of Kendi’s inversion: here racial ideas clearly serve policy/economic self-interest, the exact causal direction the reader is tracking.
• SEED: The cloth contradiction (slavers knew Africans wore clothes yet spread nakedness lies) is a crisp exhibit for an essay applying Kendi’s inversion to modern willful ignorance.