  However, particular care must be taken in characterizing an engaged thinker’s commitments and aspirations as “assimilationist.” While appropriate and useful in some instances, in others the label is often misused or misplaced, for various thinkers were quite nuanced in articulating their positions on various matters: for example, in advocating assimilation of prevailing economic ideas, principles, and practices while advocating social, cultural, and political independence for Black people. Douglass, one of the most well-known of African American cultural and political assimilationists, is an instructive example. He was not an advocate of the assimilation of the Negro race into the White race; rather, he preferred, at the extreme, the assimilation of all distinct races into a single, blended race, so to speak, so that there would no longer be distinct races in which aspirations for super-ordination and subordination could be invested. Similar views on cultural and economic assimilation were articulated by T. Thomas Fortune (1856–1928), the journalist and advocate of Black unionizing and political independence (“Political Independence of the Negro,” 1884), and by the radical abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet (1815–1881), who at one point was convinced that “This western world is destined to be filled with a mixed race” (“The Past and the Present Condition and the Destiny of the Colored Race,” (1848; 1996, p. 200), emphasis in the original).