A popular antiracist cultural work can discredit entrenched racist myths

Evidence

Roots unearthed legions of racist ideas of backward Africa, of civilizing American slavery, of the contented slave, of stupid and imbruted slaves, of loose enslaved women, and of African American roots in slavery. The plantation genre of happy mammies and Sambos was gone with the wind. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1059

Categorization

• XREF: Tests the reader’s discomfort case—here a cultural idea seems to precede policy change, a counterpoint to Kendi’s policy-first inversion worth holding alongside it.
• QUESTION: Does the Roots effect on racist ideas precede or follow desegregation and civil rights policy already enacted in the 1960s? Worth checking against the book’s chronology.