Slaveholding patriots kept both anti-British rhetoric and slavery because both served their self-interest.

Evidence

Rhode Island pastor Samuel Hopkins, an antislavery Puritan, would have found Jefferson’s passage laughable. He had just sent the congress A Dialogue concerning the Slavery of the Africans. Americans’ so-called enslavement to the British was “lighter than a feather” compared to Africans’ enslavement to Americans, Hopkins argued. … Hopkins became the first major Christian leader outside of the Society of Friends to forcefully oppose slavery, but he sat lonely on the pew of antislavery in 1776. Other preachers stayed away from the pew, and so did the delegates declaring independence. No one had to tell them that their revolutionary avowals were leaking in contradictions. Nothing could persuade slaveholding American patriots to put an end to their inciting proclamations of British slavery, or to their enriching enslavement of African people. Forget contradictions. Both were in their political and economic self-interest. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 278

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates Kendi’s master claim that self-interest, not ideology, drives racist policy — the patriot knows his avowals leak contradictions yet persists because both serve his political and economic interest.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the grafting of self-interest-before-ideas onto the ‘sacrifice’ framework — the contradiction is sustained because both sides pay off in power and enrichment.