Southern indigenous slaveholders rejected racial ideology yet still enslaved Black people.

Evidence

NO MATTER WHAT Thomas Jefferson said to Henri Gregoire in 1809, Black people were not gaining daily in the opinions of those Choctaws and Chickasaws who started acquiring them (or were re-enslaving runaways). While these indigenous southern slaveholders rejected ideas of White superiority and Native American inferiority, they embraced associations of Blackness with slavery. … Enslaved Africans in Jefferson’s Louisiana Territory were not gaining daily in the opinions of their French and American masters, either. And these captives refused to wait until their French and American masters gained an emancipatory opinion of them, knowing they could be waiting forever for their freedom. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 372

Categorization

• XREF: Powerful testing evidence for the reader’s stated goal: here enslavement of Blacks by indigenous nations occurred WITHOUT racist ideas about White superiority or Native inferiority — policy without the justifying ideology, supporting the inversion.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the Choctaw/Chickasaw case show policy driven purely by economic self-interest with no racist idea preceding it, or did they hold a Black-inferiority belief distinct from White-superiority ideology? The passage explicitly says they embraced ‘associations of Blackness with slavery’ — where does that sit in Kendi’s scheme?