Antiracist Black Power often just inverted rather than abolished color hierarchies.

Evidence

All these Black Power chants caused some African Americans to trash their racist color hierarchies within Blackness (the lighter, the better). Some activists ominously inverted the color hierarchy, judging one’s Blackness to be based on the darkness of the skin, the kinkiness of the hair, the size of the Afro, the degree of Ebonics fluency, or the willingness (of a light-skinned Black) to date a dark-skinned Black, or on whether someone wore Black leather or African garb or could quote Malcolm X. Antiracist Black Power activists engaged in the process of unearthing and trashing all of the deep-rooted assimilationist White standards. They were in the process of stopping Black people from looking at themselves and the world through what Du Bois had termed “the eyes of others” (and what the Kerner Commission had termed the “white perspective”). Antiracist Black Power compelled the controversial search for new standards, for Black perspectives, for Black people looking at themselves through their own eyes. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1023

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages the reader’s discomfort with internal color hierarchies; Du Bois’s double consciousness connects to the reader’s own knowledge of the concept. — connects to: Early antiracism’s black-white focus was reductive and essentialist, obscuring multiple racisms. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 900
• QUESTION: Kendi implies the inversion of color hierarchy is itself racist — does an inverted hierarchy fully escape the assimilationist frame, or is it just a mirror image?