The Enlightenment secularized and expanded racist discourse in the American colonies.

Evidence

Cotton Mather’s missionary counterpart in Virginia, James Blair, died sixteen days after Thomas’s birth, marking the end of an era when theologians almost completely dominated the racial discourse in America. The year also marked the birth of a new intellectual era. “Enlightened” thinkers started secularizing and expanding the racist discourse throughout the colonies, tutoring future antislavery, anti-abolitionist, and anti-royal revolutionaries in Thomas Jefferson’s generation. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 197

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the reader’s project: the Enlightenment’s ‘reason’ discourse was itself produced by and productive of racist ideas — an example to test the policy-first inversion against. — connects to: Enlightenment eliminated negation from language, silencing the oppressed. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 791; Eighteenth century ethnology secularized racism into a scientific ideology justifying conquest.; Racism supplied the ideological license for US settler-colonial expansion.
• QUESTION: Does this secularized racism precede or follow racist policy? Kendi frames it as ideas serving anti-royal and anti-abolitionist interests, worth pressing on the inversion.