1990s conservative intellectuals reframed antiracist efforts as the true racism

Evidence

In his 1997 book Liberal Racism, journalist Jim Sleeper argued that anyone who was not color blind—or “transracial”—was racist. In their runaway success of the same year, America in Black & White, Manhattan Institute Fellow Abigail Thernstrom and Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom said that “race-consciousness policies make for more race-consciousness; they carry American society backward.” “Few whites are now racists,” and what dominates race relations now is “black anger” and “white surrender,” the Thernstroms wrote, echoing the essays in The Race Card, an influential 1997 anthology edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz. Criers of racial discrimination were playing the fake “race card,” and it was winning because of liberal “white guilt.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1162

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the rhetorical move of accusing Antiracists of being racist — ‘the race card’ inversion — as a recurring technique across eras, from slaveholders to Thernstroms.