Whiteness as a symbol of beauty and purity was culturally entrenched before racist policy.

Evidence

Mather wrote of all humans having a White soul the same year John Locke declared all unblemished minds to be White. Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton had already popularized light as White. Michelangelo had already painted the original Adam and God as both being White in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. And for all these White men, Whiteness symbolized beauty, a trope taken up by one of the first popular novels by an English woman. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 149

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s ‘Grafting & Growth’ tree article is not applicable here, but this connects to the idea of Whiteness as a preexisting aesthetic trope that later got grafted onto racist ideas — a case where an idea (beauty=white) predates policy, which the reader wants to test against Kendi’s inversion.