Supplying enslaved people to Agassiz promoted slavery, not racial theory.

Evidence

In my head, I reasoned that Sancho had to play the game. He knew that he had to appease his master. I also thought it was ironic that the Taylors celebrated the fact that Sancho could read and write. If Sancho was a learned man, like Papa Renty, I thought, why would the Taylors support Agassiz’s theories by supplying examples of what they must have thought was an inferior race? It was all so confusing. I was puzzled. If the Taylors knew about enslaved people’s literacy, how could they support Agassiz’s theories? The whole purpose was to prove Black inferiority, and this story that Dr. Taylor had just shared did the opposite. This reconfirmed that supplying people he had enslaved to Agassiz as subjects was not about proving Black inferiority: it was about the promotion of slavery. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 478

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s thesis that the Agassiz photographs served slavery’s institutional interests, contra the standard account.
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox — literate literate-enclaved people as Agassiz subjects — reframes the photographs’ purpose from racial science to slavery promotion, a genuinely counterintuitive interpretive move.