A critique of the Black middle class can itself carry racism

Evidence

In Black Bourgeoisie, Frazier delivered the most withering attack on the Black middle class in the history of American letters, commercializing a new class racism: the Black bourgeoisie as inferior to the White bourgeoisie, as more socially irresponsible, as bigger conspicuous consumers, as more politically corrupt, as more exploitative, and as sillier in their “politics of respectability,” to use historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s recent term. Despite, or rather because of, Frazier’s overreach into class racism, Black Bourgeoisie had a significant effect on the civil rights movement, galvanizing Martin Luther King’s generation of middle-class youngsters to break away from what Frazier termed their apathetic “world of make-believe.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 936

Categorization

• XREF: Exemplifies Kendi’s point that assimilationism (the Black middle class aspired to White-bourgeois cultural norms) is a racist position that even Black critics attacked with their own class racism.
• DEEPTHINKING: Kendi’s move here is subtle: Frazier attacks the Black middle class with the standard assimilationist vocabulary (conspicuous consumption, irresponsibility) yet still galvanized the movement. The idea that anti-middle-class critique can simultaneously be racist and effective is a paradigm-testing claim.