The first anti-Black treatise was commissioned to justify existing slave-trading

Evidence

In 1453, Zurara finished the inaugural defense of African slave-trading, the first European book on Africans in the modern era. The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea begins the recorded history of anti-Black racist ideas. Zurara’s inaugural racist ideas, in other words, were a product of, not a producer of, Prince Henry’s racist policies concerning African slave-trading. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 51

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the earliest concrete illustration of Kendi’s central causal inversion: policy first, justifying idea second.
• DEEPTHINKING: The word ‘inaugural’ plus the explicit product/producer reversal is the chapter’s load-bearing formulation of the book’s thesis, dense with the whole argument.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: whether the Chronicle’s framing genuinely postdated Henry’s trading policy or merely rationalized a decision that itself rested on older ideas about Africans.