“Before the Notts, the Gliddens, the Agassiz, the Mortons made their profound discoveries,” speaking “in the name of science,” Douglass said, humans believed in monogenesis. Nearly all advocates of polygenesis “hold it be the privilege of the Anglo-Saxon to enslave and oppress the African,” he went on. “When men oppress their fellow-men, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression.” Douglass, amazingly, summed up the history of racist ideas in a single sentence.
