Compared to his peers, TR was relatively liberal. He opposed legal discrimination, and he famously invited Booker T. Washington to dine with him at the White House. But Roosevelt was also a social Darwinist. He held baroque ideas about the inborn traits of various "races," whether "Slav," "Teutonic," "Asiatic," "Negro," or otherwise. He made it clear that he believed black and "yellow" people to be both culturally and biologically inferior to whites.