The scientist of whiteness also directly advised the slaveholding empire.

Evidence

Robert Boyle would not live to read Opticks. He died, after a long and influential life, in 1691. During his lifetime, he did not merely found chemistry, whiten light, power the Royal Society, and inspire Isaac Newton, the Mather clan, and throngs of intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic. Boyle sat on the original Council for Foreign Plantations in 1660, which was commissioned concurrently with the Royal Society to centralize and advise the vast empire that Charles II inherited. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 109

Categorization

• XREF: Links science and empire as twin instruments of racial ordering — connects to the reader’s earlier engagement with how the Royal Society’s ‘objectivity’ promoted racist ideas.