A white southern scholar was needed to break the Dunning School consensus

Evidence

To a New Yorker reviewer, Du Bois took the “odd view, in distinction to most previous writers, that the Negro is a human being.” Du Bois’s Reconstruction history “changed or swept away” our “familiar scenes and landmarks,” wrote the reviewer for Time. But Du Bois did not blunt the appeal of The Tragic Era among southern segregationists. It is unlikely that racist readers would have their minds changed by a Black scholar. Indeed, it would take the legitimacy of a White historian and native southerner, historian Howard K. Beale of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to break the consensus of Columbia’s Dunning School in 1940. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 857

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to reader’s core interest in whether ideas precede policy — here Kendi shows credibility is raced, meaning whose ideas count depends on identity, reinforcing his causal inversion.